Bricks that every removable edge is solitary

Abstract

A brick is a 3-connected graph $G$ such that $G-u-v$ has a perfect matching for any two distinct vertices $u,v\in V(G)$. An edge $e$ in a matching covered graph $G$ is removable if $G-e$ is matching covered. We say that a removable edge $e$ in a brick $G$ is $b$-invariant if $b(G-e)=b(G)=1$, where $b(H)$ denotes the number of bricks in the tight cut decomposition of a matching covered graph $H$. An edge of a graph is solitary if it lies in precisely one perfect matching. Lucchesi and Murty proposed the problem of characterizing bricks, distinct from $K_4$, $\overline{C_6}$ and the Petersen graph, in which every $b$-invariant edge is solitary. Note that every $b$-invariant edge is removable. In this paper, we strengthen the condition by requiring that every removable edge is solitary. We show that every nonsolid brick satisfying this strengthened condition can be obtained by repeatedly splicing odd wheels (up to multiple edges). Moreover, properties of such bricks imply that "repeatedly splicing odd wheels" cannot be replaced by "repeatedly splicing copies of $K_4$".