Isolation of non-triangle cycles in graphs

Abstract

Given a set $\mathcal{F}$ of graphs, we call a copy of a graph in $\mathcal{F}$ an $\mathcal{F}$-graph. The $\mathcal{F}$-isolation number of a graph $G$, denoted by $\iota(G, \mathcal{F})$, is the size of a smallest set $D$ of vertices of $G$ such that the closed neighbourhood of $D$ intersects the vertex sets of the $\mathcal{F}$-graphs contained by $G$ (equivalently, $G-N[D]$ contains no $\mathcal{F}$-graph). Let $\mathcal{C}$ be the set of cycles, and let $\mathcal{C}'$ be the set of non-triangle cycles (that is, cycles of length at least $4$). Let $G$ be a connected graph having exactly $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. The first author proved that $\iota(G,\mathcal{C}) \leq n/4$ if $G$ is not a triangle. Bartolo and the authors proved that $\iota(G,\{C_4\}) \leq n/5$ if $G$ is not a copy of one of nine graphs. Various authors proved that $\iota(G,\mathcal{C}) \leq (m+1)/5$ if $G$ is not a triangle. We prove that $\iota(G,\mathcal{C}') \leq (m+1)/6$ if $G$ is not a $4$-cycle. Zhang and Wu established this for the case where $G$ is triangle-free. Our result yields the inequality $\iota(G,\{C_4\}) \leq (m+1)/6$ of Wei, Zhang and Zhao. These bounds are attained by infinitely many (non-isomorphic) graphs. The proof of our inequality hinges on also determining the graphs attaining the bound.