By Smith’s theorem, if a cubic graph has a Hamiltonian cycle, then it has a second Hamiltonian cycle. Thomason [‘Hamilton cycles and uniquely edge-colourable graphs’, Ann. Discrete Math.3 (1978), 259–268] gave a simple algorithm to find the second cycle. Thomassen [private communication] observed that if there exists a polynomially bounded algorithm for finding a second Hamiltonian cycle in a cubic cyclically 4-edge connected graph $G$, then there exists a polynomially bounded algorithm for finding a second Hamiltonian cycle in any cubic graph $G$. In this paper we present a class of cyclically 4-edge connected cubic bipartite graphs $G_{i}$ with $16(i+1)$ vertices such that Thomason’s algorithm takes $12(2^{i}-1)+3$ steps to find a second Hamiltonian cycle in $G_{i}$.

We prove the conjecture formulated in Litvak and Ejov (2009), namely, that the trace of the fundamental matrix of a singularly perturbed Markov chain that corresponds to a stochastic policy feasible for a given graph is minimised at policies corresponding to Hamiltonian cycles.

A set E of edges of a graph G is said to be a dominating set of edges if every edge of G either belongs to E or is adjacent to an edge of E. If the subgraph 〈E〉 induced by E is a trail T, then T is called a dominating trail of G. Dominating circuits are defined analogously. A sufficient condition is given for a graph to possess a spanning (and thus dominating) circuit and a sufficient condition is given for a graph to possess a spanning (and thus dominating) trail between each pair of distinct vertices. The line graph L(G) of a graph G is defined to be that graph whose vertex set can be put in one-to-one correspondence with the edge set of G in such a way that two vertices of L(G) are adjacent if and only if the corresponding edges of G are adjacent. The existence of dominating trails and circuits is employed to present results on line graphs and second iterated line graphs, respectively.