A Relationship Between Thomassen's Conjecture and Bondy's Conjecture

Abstract

In 1986, Thomassen posed the following conjecture: every 4-connected line graph has a Hamiltonian cycle. As a possible approach to the conjecture, many researchers have considered statements that are equivalent or related to it. One of them is the conjecture by Bondy: there exists a constant $c_0$ with $0 < c_0 \leq 1$ such that every cyclically 4-edge-connected cubic graph $H$ has a cycle of length at least $c_0 |V(H)|$. It is known that Thomassen's conjecture implies Bondy's conjecture, but nothing about the converse has been shown. In this paper, we show that Bondy's conjecture implies a slightly weaker version of Thomassen's conjecture: every 4-connected line graph with minimum degree at least 5 has a Hamiltonian cycle.