Spanning Trees of a Claw-Free Graph Whose Reducible Stems Have Few Leaves

Abstract

Let T be a tree. The reducible stem of T is the smallest subtree that contains all branch vertices of T. In this paper, we first use a new technique of Gould and Shull [5] to state a new short proof for a result of Kano et al. [10] on the spanning tree with a bounded number of leaves in a claw-free graph. After that, we use a similar idea to prove a sharp sufficient condition for a claw-free graph having a spanning tree whose reducible stem has few leaves.