By Smith’s theorem, if a cubic graph has a Hamiltonian cycle, then it has a second Hamiltonian cycle. Thomason [‘Hamilton cycles and uniquely edge-colourable graphs’, Ann. Discrete Math.3 (1978), 259–268] gave a simple algorithm to find the second cycle. Thomassen [private communication] observed that if there exists a polynomially bounded algorithm for finding a second Hamiltonian cycle in a cubic cyclically 4-edge connected graph $G$, then there exists a polynomially bounded algorithm for finding a second Hamiltonian cycle in any cubic graph $G$. In this paper we present a class of cyclically 4-edge connected cubic bipartite graphs $G_{i}$ with $16(i+1)$ vertices such that Thomason’s algorithm takes $12(2^{i}-1)+3$ steps to find a second Hamiltonian cycle in $G_{i}$.

We study the number of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles one can guarantee in a sufficiently large graph G on n vertices with minimum degree δ=(1/2+α)n. For any constant α>0, we give an optimal answer in the following sense: let regeven(n,δ) denote the degree of the largest even-regular spanning subgraph one can guarantee in a graph on n vertices with minimum degree δ. Then the number of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles we find equals regeven(n,δ)/2. The value of regeven(n,δ) is known for infinitely many values of n and δ. We also extend our results to graphs G of minimum degree δ ≥ n/2, unless G is close to the extremal constructions for Dirac's theorem. Our proof relies on a recent and very general result of Kühn and Osthus on Hamilton decomposition of robustly expanding regular graphs.