Homeomorphically Irreducible Spanning Trees in Locally Connected Graphs

A spanning tree T of a graph G is called a homeomorphically irreducible spanning tree (HIST) if T does not contain vertices of degree 2. A graph G is called locally connected if for every vertex v ∈ V (G), the subgraph induced by the neighborhood of v is connected. In this paper, we prove that every connected and locally connected graph with more than 3 vertices contains a HIST. Consequently, we confirm the following conjecture due to Archdeacon: every graph that triangulates some surface has a HIST, which was proposed as a question by Albertson, Berman, Hutchinson, and Thomassen.