On the Hamiltonian Property Hierarchy of 3-Connected Planar Graphs

The prism over a graph $G$ is the Cartesian product of $G$ with the complete graph $K_2$. The graph $G$ is prism-hamiltonian if the prism over $G$ has a Hamilton cycle. A good even cactus is a connected graph in which every block is either an edge or an even cycle and every vertex is contained in at most two blocks. It is known that good even cacti are prism-hamiltonian. Indeed, showing the existence of a spanning good even cactus has become the most common technique in proving prism-hamiltonicity. Špacapan [S. Špacapan. A counterexample to prism-hamiltonicity of 3-connected planar graphs. J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, 146:364--371, 2021] asked whether having a spanning good even cactus is equivalent to having a hamiltonian prism for 3-connected planar graphs. In this article we answer his question in the negative, by showing that there are infinitely many 3-connected planar prism-hamiltonian graphs that have no spanning good even cactus. In addition, we prove the existence of an infinite class of 3-connected planar graphs that have a spanning good even cactus but no spanning good even cactus with maximum degree three.