On the genera of polyhedral embeddings of cubic graph

In this article we present theoretical and computational results on the existence of polyhedral embeddings of graphs. The emphasis is on cubic graphs. We also describe an efficient algorithm to compute all polyhedral embeddings of a given cubic graph and constructions for cubic graphs with some special properties of their polyhedral embeddings. Some key results are that even cubic graphs with a polyhedral embedding on the torus can also have polyhedral embeddings in arbitrarily high genus, in fact in a genus {\em close} to the theoretical maximum for that number of vertices, and that there is no bound on the number of genera in which a cubic graph can have a polyhedral embedding. While these results suggest a large variety of polyhedral embeddings, computations for up to 28 vertices suggest that by far most of the cubic graphs do not have a polyhedral embedding in any genus and that the ratio of these graphs is increasing with the number of vertices.

Gap sets for the spectra of cubic graphs

We study gaps in the spectra of the adjacency matrices of large finite cubic graphs. It is known that the gap intervals ( 2 2 , 3 ) (2 \sqrt {2},3) and [ − 3 , − 2 ) [-3,-2) achieved in cubic Ramanujan graphs and line graphs are maximal. We give constraints on spectra in [ − 3 , 3 ] [-3,3] which are maximally gapped and construct examples which achieve these bounds. These graphs yield new instances of maximally gapped intervals. We also show that every point in [ − 3 , 3 ) [-3,3) can be gapped by planar cubic graphs. Our results show that the study of spectra of cubic, and even planar cubic, graphs is subtle and very rich.