Minimal unavoidable sets of cycles in plane graphs

Abstract

A set \(S\) of cycles is minimal unavoidable in a graph family \(\cal{G}\) if each graph \(G \in \cal{G}\) contains a cycle from \(S\) and, for each proper subset \(S^{\prime}\subset S\), there exists an infinite subfamily \(\cal{G}^{\prime}\subseteq\cal{G}\) such that no graph from \(\cal{G}^{\prime}\) contains a cycle from \(S^{\prime}\). In this paper, we study minimal unavoidable sets of cycles in plane graphs of minimum degree at least 3 and present several graph constructions which forbid many cycle sets to be unavoidable. We also show the minimality of several small sets consisting of short cycles.