Homomorphisms of Cayley graphs and Cycle Double Covers

Abstract

We study the following conjecture of Matt DeVos: If there is a graph homomorphism from a Cayley graph $\mathrm{Cay}(M, B)$ to another Cayley graph $\mathrm{Cay}(M', B')$ then every graph with an $(M,B)$-flow has an $(M',B')$-flow. This conjecture was originally motivated by the flow-tension duality. We show that a natural strengthening of this conjecture does not hold in all cases but we conjecture that it still holds for an interesting subclass of them and we prove a partial result in this direction. We also show that the original conjecture implies the existence of an oriented cycle double cover with a small number of cycles.