On Tutte cycles containing three prescribed edges

A cycle C in a graph G is called a Tutte cycle if, after deleting C from G, each component has at most three neighbors on C. Tutte cycles play an important role in the study of Hamiltonicity of planar graphs. Thomas and Yu and independently Sanders proved the existence of Tutte cycles containining three specified edges of a facial cycle in a 2-connected plane graph. We prove a quantitative version of this result, bounding the number of components of the graph obtained by deleting a Tutte cycle. As a corollary, we can find long cycles in essentially 4-connected plane graphs that also contain three prescribed edges of a facial cycle. AMS Subject Classification: 05C38, 05C40, 05C45