Hamiltonian cycles in covering graphs of trees

Abstract

Hamiltonicity of graphs possessing symmetry has been a popular subject of research, with focus on vertex-transitive graphs, and in particular on Cayley graphs. In this paper, we consider the Hamiltonicity of another class of graphs with symmetry, namely covering graphs of trees. In particular, we study the problem for covering graphs of trees, where the tree is a voltage graph over a cyclic group. Batagelj and Pisanski were first to obtain such a result, in the special case when the voltage assignment is trivial; in that case, the covering graph is simply a Cartesian product of the tree and a cycle. We consider more complex voltage assignments, and extend the results of Batagelj and Pisanski in two different ways; in these cases the covering graphs cannot be expressed as products. We also provide a linear time algorithm to test whether a given assignment satisfies these conditions.