On the spanning structure hierarchy of 3-connected planar graphs

Abstract

The prism over a graph $G$ is the Cartesian product of $G$ with the complete graph $K_2$. $G$ is prism-hamiltonian if the prism over $G$ has a Hamilton cycle. A good even cactus is a connected graph in which every block is either an edge or an even cycle, and every vertex is contained in at most two blocks. It is known that good even cacti are prism-hamiltonian. Indeed, showing the existence of a spanning good even cactus has become one of the most common techniques in proving prism-hamiltonicity. \v{S}pacapan asked whether having a spanning good even cactus is equivalent to having a hamiltonian prism for 3-connected planar graphs. In this article we give a negative answer to this question by showing that there are infinitely many 3-connected planar prism-hamiltonian graphs that have no spanning good even cactus. We also prove the existence of an infinite class of 3-connected planar graphs that have a spanning good even cactus but no spanning good even cactus with maximum degree three.