Integer flows on triangularly connected signed graphs

Abstract

AbstractA triangle‐path in a graph is a sequence of distinct triangles in such that for any with , and if . A connected graph is triangularly connected if for any two nonparallel edges and there is a triangle‐path such that and . For ordinary graphs, Fan et al. characterize all triangularly connected graphs that admit nowhere‐zero 3‐flows or 4‐flows. Corollaries of this result include the integer flow of some families of ordinary graphs, such as locally connected graphs due to Lai and some types of products of graphs due to Imrich et al. In this paper, Fan's result for triangularly connected graphs is further extended to signed graphs. We proved that a flow‐admissible triangularly connected signed graph admits a nowhere‐zero 4‐flow if and only if it is not the wheel associated with a specific signature. Moreover, this result is sharp since there are infinitely many unbalanced triangularly connected signed graphs admitting a nowhere‐zero 4‐flow but no 3‐flow.