Given a positive integer $d$, the $d$-CUT problem is to decide if an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ has a non trivial bipartition $(A,B)$ of $V$ such that every vertex in $A$ (resp. $B$) has at most $d$ neighbors in $B$ (resp. $A$). When $d=1$, this is the MATCHING CUT problem. Gomes and Sau, in IPEC 2019, gave the first fixed parameter tractable algorithm for $d$-CUT, when parameterized by maximum number of the crossing edges in the cut (i.e. the size of edge cut). However, their paper doesn't provide an explicit bound on the running time, as it indirectly relies on a MSOL formulation and Courcelle's Theorem. Motivated by this, we design and present an FPT algorithm for the MATCHING CUT (and more generally for $d$-CUT) for general graphs with running time $2^{O(k\log k)}n^{O(1)}$ where $k$ is the maximum size of the edge cut. This is the first FPT algorithm for the MATCHING CUT (and $d$-CUT) with an explicit dependence on this parameter. We also observe a lower bound of $2^{\Omega(k)}n^{O(1)}$ with same parameter for MATCHING CUT assuming ETH.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-79987-8_37