Spotting Trees with Few Leaves
We show two results related to finding trees and paths in graphs. First, we show that in $O^*(1.657^k2^{l/2})$ time one can either find a $k$-vertex tree with $l$ leaves in an $n$-vertex undirected graph or conclude that such a tree does not exist. Our solution can be applied as a subroutine to solve the $k$-Internal Spanning Tree problem in $O^*(min(3.455^k, 1.946^n))$ time using polynomial space
