On the connectivity and restricted edge-connectivity of 3-arc graphs

Abstract

A 3 − arc of a graph G is a 4-tuple (y, a, b, x) of vertices such that both (y, a, b) and (a, b, x) are paths of length two in G. Let ←→G denote the symmetric digraph of a graph G. The 3-arc graph X(G) of a given graph G is defined to have vertices the arcs of ←→G . Two vertices (ay), (bx) are adjacent in X(G) if and only if (y, a, b, x) is a 3-arc of G. The purpose of this work is to study the edge-connectivity and restricted edge-connectivity of 3-arc graphs. We prove that the 3-arc graph X(G) of every connected graph G of minimum degree δ(G) ≥ 3 has edgeconnectivity λ(X(G)) ≥ (δ(G) − 1)2; and restricted edge- connectivity λ(2)(X(G)) ≥ 2(δ(G) − 1)2 − 2 if κ(G) ≥ 2. We also provide examples showing that all these bounds are sharp.