Accordion graphs: Hamiltonicity, matchings and isomorphism with quartic circulants

Abstract

Let $G$ be a graph of even order and let $K_{G}$ be the complete graph on the same vertex set of $G$. A pairing of a graph $G$ is a perfect matching of the graph $K_{G}$. A graph $G$ has the Pairing-Hamiltonian property (for short, the PH-property) if for each one of its pairings, there exists a perfect matching of $G$ such that the union of the two gives rise to a Hamiltonian cycle of $K_G$. In 2015, Alahmadi \emph{et al.} gave a complete characterisation of the cubic graphs having the PH-property. Most naturally, the next step is to characterise the quartic graphs that have the PH-property. In this work we propose a class of quartic graphs on two parameters, $n$ and $k$, which we call the class of accordion graphs $A[n,k]$. We show that an infinite family of quartic graphs (which are also circulant) that Alahmadi \emph{et al.} stated to have the PH-property are, in fact, members of this general class of accordion graphs. We also study the PH-property of this class of accordion graphs, at times considering the pairings of $G$ which are also perfect matchings of $G$. Furthermore, there is a close relationship between accordion graphs and the Cartesian product of two cycles. Motivated by a recent work by Bogdanowicz (2015), we give a complete characterisation of those accordion graphs that are circulant graphs. In fact, we show that $A[n,k]$ is not circulant if and only if both $n$ and $k$ are even, such that $k\geq 4$.