A note on nowhere-zero 3-flow and Z_3-connectivity

Fuyuan Chen, Bo Ning

Published 2014-06-06, updated 2014-07-18Version 2

There are many major open problems in integer flow theory, such as Tutte's 3-flow conjecture that every 4-edge-connected graph admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow, Jaeger et al.'s conjecture that every 5-edge-connected graph is $Z_3$-connected and Kochol's conjecture that every bridgeless graph with at most three 3-edge-cuts admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow (an equivalent version of 3-flow conjecture). Thomassen proved that every 8-edge-connected graph is $Z_3$-connected and therefore admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow. Furthermore, Lov$\acute{a}$sz, Thomassen, Wu and Zhang improved Thomassen's result to 6-edge-connected graphs. In this paper, we prove that: (1) Every 4-edge-connected graph with at most seven 5-edge-cuts admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow. (2) Every bridgeless graph containing no 5-edge-cuts but at most three 3-edge-cuts admits a nowhere-zero 3-flow. (3) Every 5-edge-connected graph with at most five 5-edge-cuts is $Z_3$-connected. Our main theorems are partial results to Tutte's 3-flow conjecture, Kochol's conjecture and Jaeger et al.'s conjecture, respectively.