Finding a good tree to burn

Abstract

The burning number of a graph $G$ is the smallest positive integer $k$ such that the vertex set of $G$ can be covered with balls of radii $0, 1, \dots, k-1$. A well-known conjecture by Bonato, Janssen and Roshabin states that any connected graph on $n$ vertices has burning number at most $\lceil \sqrt{n} \rceil$. It was recently shown by Norin and Turcotte that the conjecture holds up to a factor of $1+o(1)$. In this note, we demonstrate how this result can be applied to determine the asymptotic value of the burning number for graph classes with given minimum degree. This is based on an observation about connected $2$-hop dominating sets, which may be of independent interest.