On asymptotic values for the minimum number of spanning forests in simple regular graphs

Abstract

Let $F(G)$ be the number of spanning forests in a graph $G$ and $\mathcal{C}(n,d)$ be the set of all connected $d$-regular simple graphs of order $n$. Define ${\hat{f}}_d={\mathrm{liminf}}_{n\to \infty }\{F(G{)}^{1/n}:G\in \mathcal{C}(n,d)\}$. Let $n_i$ be the number of vertices of degree $i$ in $G$. In this paper we give two lower bounds for $F(G)$ in terms of $n_i$ in connected graphs whose vertex degrees belong to $\{2,3\}$ and $\{2,3,4\}$, respectively. Furthermore, we determine the exact values of ${\hat{f}}_3$ and ${\hat{f}}_4$.