We study the multicolour discrepancy of spanning trees and Hamilton cycles in graphs. As our main result, we show that under very mild conditions, the $r$-colour spanning-tree discrepancy of a graph $G$ is equal, up to a constant, to the minimum $s$ such that $G$ can be separated into $r$ equal parts by deleting $s$ vertices. This result arguably resolves the question of estimating the spanning-tree discrepancy in essentially all graphs of interest. In particular, it allows us to immediately deduce as corollaries most of the results that appear in a recent paper of Balogh, Csaba, Jing and Pluhár, proving them in wider generality and for any number of colours. We also obtain several new results, such as determining the spanning-tree discrepancy of the hypercube. For the special case of graphs possessing certain expansion properties, we obtain exact asymptotic bounds.
We also study the multicolour discrepancy of Hamilton cycles in graphs of large minimum degree, showing that in any $r$-colouring of the edges of a graph with $n$ vertices and minimum degree at least $\frac{r+1}{2r}n + d$, there must exist a Hamilton cycle with at least $\frac{n}{r} + 2d$ edges in some colour. This extends a result of Balogh et al., who established the case $r = 2$. The constant $\frac{r+1}{2r}$ in this result is optimal; it cannot be replaced by any smaller constant.
In the literature, the notion of discrepancy is used in several contexts, even in the theory of graphs. Here, for a graph $G$, $\{-1, 1\}$ labels are assigned to the edges, and we consider a family $\mathcal{S}_G$ of (spanning) subgraphs of certain types, among others spanning trees, Hamiltonian cycles. As usual, we seek for bounds on the sum of the labels that hold for all elements of $\mathcal{S}_G$, for every labeling.
The prism over a graph $G$ is the Cartesian product of $G$ with the complete graph $K_2$. $G$ is prism-hamiltonian if the prism over $G$ has a Hamilton cycle. A good even cactus is a connected graph in which every block is either an edge or an even cycle, and every vertex is contained in at most two blocks. It is known that good even cacti are prism-hamiltonian. Indeed, showing the existence of a spanning good even cactus has become one of the most common techniques in proving prism-hamiltonicity. Špacapan asked whether having a spanning good even cactus is equivalent to having a hamiltonian p…
Let $G$ be an $n$-vertex graph with $n\ge 3$. A classic result of Dirac from 1952 asserts that $G$ is hamiltonian if $δ(G)\ge n/2$. Dirac's theorem is one of the most influential results in the study of hamiltonicity and by now there are many related known results\,(see, e.g., J. A. Bondy, Basic Graph Theory: Paths and Circuits, Chapter 1 in: {\it Handbook of Combinatorics Vol.1}). A {\it Halin graph} is a planar graph consisting of two edge-disjoint subgraphs: a spanning tree of at least 4 vertices and with no vertex of degree 2, and a cycle induced on the set of the leaves of the spanning tr…
A well-known conjecture of Alspach says that every $2k$-regular Cayley graph of an abelian group can be decomposed into Hamiltonian cycles. We consider an analogous question for infinite abelian groups. In this setting one natural analogue of a Hamiltonian cycle is a spanning double-ray. However, a naive generalisation of Alspach's conjecture fails to hold in this setting due to the existence of $2k$-regular Cayley graphs with finite cuts $F$ where $|F|$ and $k$ differ in parity, which necessarily preclude the existence of a decomposition into spanning double-rays. We show that every $4$-regul…
A digraph is {\bf eulerian} if it is connected and every vertex has its in-degree equal to its out-degree. Having a spanning eulerian subdigraph is thus a weakening of having a hamiltonian cycle. A digraph is {\bf semicomplete} if it has no pair of non-adjacent vertices. A {\bf tournament} is a semicomplete digraph without directed cycles of length 2. Fraise and Thomassen \cite{fraisseGC3} proved that every $(k+1)$-strong tournament has a hamiltonian cycle which avoids any prescribed set of $k$ arcs. In \cite{bangsupereuler} the authors demonstrated that a number of results concerning vertex-c…
A tree with at most $k$ leaves is called a $k$-ended tree. A spanning 2-ended tree is a Hamilton path. A Hamilton cycle can be considered as a spanning 1-ended tree. The earliest result concerning spanning trees with few leaves states that if $k$ is a positive integer and $G$ is a connected graph of order $n$ with $d(x)+d(y)\ge n-k+1$ for each pair of nonadjacent vertices $x,y$, then $G$ has a spanning $k$-ended tree. In this paper, we improve this result in two ways, and an analogous result is proved for dominating $k$-ended trees based on the generalized parameter $t_k$ - the order of a larg…
We consider questions related to the existence of spanning trees in graphs with the property that after the removal of any path in the tree the graph remains connected. We show that, for planar graphs, the existence of trees with this property is closely related to the Hamiltonicity of the graph. For graphs with a 1- or 2-vertex cut, the Hamiltonicity also plays a central role. We also deal with spanning trees satisfying this property restricted to paths arising from fundamental cycles. The cycle space of a graph can be generated by the fundamental cycles of any spanning tree, and Tutte showed…
We describe a general approach of determining the distribution of spanning subgraphs in the random graph $\G(n,p)$. In particular, we determine the distribution of spanning subgraphs of certain given degree sequences, which is a generalisation of the $d$-factors, of spanning triangle-free subgraphs, of (directed) Hamilton cycles and of spanning subgraphs that are isomorphic to a collection of vertex disjoint (directed) triangles.
We prove a refinement of the tree packing theorem by Tutte/Nash-Williams for finite graphs. This result is used to obtain a similar result for end faithful spanning tree packings in certain infinite graphs and consequently to establish a sufficient Hamiltonicity condition for the line graphs of such graphs.
It is a well-known fact that hamiltonicity in planar cubic graphs is an NP-complete problem. This implies that the existence of an A-trail in plane eulerian graphs is also an NP-complete problem even if restricted to planar 3-connected eulerian graphs. In this paper we deal with hamiltonicity in planar cubic graphs G having a facial 2-factor Q via (quasi) spanning trees of faces in G/Q and study the algorithmic complexity of finding such (quasi) spanning trees of faces. We show, in particular, that if Barnette's Conjecture is false, then hamiltonicity in 3-connected planar cubic bipartite grap…
We prove that any one-ended, locally finite Cayley graph with non-torsion generators admits a decomposition into edge-disjoint Hamiltonian (i.e. spanning) double-rays. In particular, the $n$-dimensional grid $\mathbb{Z}^n$ admits a decomposition into $n$ edge-disjoint Hamiltonian double-rays for all $n \in \mathbb{N}$.
Let $G$ be a simple graph with $n\geq4$ vertices and $d(x)+d(y)\geq n+k$ for each edge $xy\in E(G)$. In this work we prove that $G$ either contains a spanning closed trail containing any given edge set $X$ if $|X|\leq k$, or $G$ is a well characterized graph. As a corollary, we show that line graphs of such graphs are $k$-hamiltonian.
We extend a recent argument of Kahn, Narayanan and Park (Proceedings of the AMS, to appear) about the threshold for the appearance of the square of a Hamilton cycle to other spanning structures. In particular, for any spanning graph, we give a sufficient condition under which we may determine its threshold. As an application, we find the threshold for a set of cyclically ordered copies of $C_4$ that span the entire vertex set, so that any two consecutive copies overlap in exactly one edge and all overlapping edges are disjoint. This answers a question of Frieze. We also determine the threshold…
An edge (vertex) cut $X$ of $G$ is $r$-essential if $G-X$ has two components each of which has at least $r$ edges. A graph $G$ is $r$-essentially $k$-edge-connected (resp. $k$-connected) if it has no $r$-essential edge (resp. vertex) cuts of size less than $k$. If $r=1$, we simply call it essential. Recently, Lai and Li proved that every $m$-edge-connected essentially $h$-edge-connected graph contains $k$ edge-disjoint spanning trees, where $k,m,h$ are positive integers such that $k+1\le m\le 2k-1$ and $h\ge \frac{m^2}{m-k}-2$. In this paper, we show that every $m$-edge-connected and $2$-essen…
For integer $k\geq2,$ a spanning $k$-ended-tree is a spanning tree with at most $k$ leaves. Motivated by the closure theorem of Broersma and Tuinstra [Independence trees and Hamilton cycles, J. Graph Theory 29 (1998) 227--237], we provide tight spectral conditions to guarantee the existence of a spanning $k$-ended-tree in a connected graph of order $n$ with extremal graphs being characterized. Moreover, by adopting Kaneko's theorem [Spanning trees with constraints on the leaf degree, Discrete Appl. Math. 115 (2001) 73--76], we also present tight spectral conditions for the existence of a spann…
The Hamiltonian number of a connected graph is the minimum of the lengths of the closed, spanning walks in the graph. In 1968, Grinberg published a necessary condition for the existence of a Hamiltonian cycle in a planar graph, formulated in terms of the lengths of its face cycles. We show how Grinberg's theorem can be adapted to provide a lower bound on the Hamiltonian number of a planar graph.
Colour diversity in spanning structures under Dirac-type conditions
IMPA（巴西国家数学研究所）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Institute for Basic Science（基础科学研究院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学数学与统计学院）
A Hamilton decomposition of a graph is a partitioning of its edge set into disjoint spanning cycles. The existence of such decompositions is known for all hypercubes of even dimension $2n$. We give a decomposition for the case $n = 2^a3^b$ that is highly symmetric in the sense that every cycle can be derived from every other cycle just by permuting the axes. We conjecture that a similar decomposition exists for every n.
For an orientation $H$ with $n$ vertices, let $T(H)$ denote the maximum possible number of labeled copies of $H$ in an $n$-vertex tournament. It is easily seen that $T(H) \ge n!/2^{e(H)}$ as the latter is the expected number of such copies in a random tournament. For $n$ odd, let $R(H)$ denote the maximum possible number of labeled copies of $H$ in an $n$-vertex regular tournament. Adler et al. proved that, in fact, for $H=C_n$ the directed Hamilton cycle, $T(C_n) \ge (e-o(1))n!/2^{n}$ and it was observed by Alon that already $R(C_n) \ge (e-o(1))n!/2^{n}$. Similar results hold for the directed…
We investigate minimum vertex degree conditions for $3$-uniform hypergraphs which ensure the existence of loose Hamilton cycles. A loose Hamilton cycle is a spanning cycle in which only consecutive edges intersect and these intersections consist of precisely one vertex. We prove that every $3$-uniform $n$-vertex ($n$ even) hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ with minimum vertex degree $δ_1(\mathcal{H})\geq \left(\frac7{16}+o(1)\right)\binom{n}{2}$ contains a loose Hamilton cycle. This bound is asymptotically best possible.
Since first introduced by Sudakov and Vu in 2008, the study of resilience problems in random graphs received a lot of attention in probabilistic combinatorics. Of particular interest are resilience problems of spanning structures. It is known that for spanning structures which contain many triangles, local resilience cannot prevent an adversary from destroying all copies of the structure by removing a negligible amount of edges incident to every vertex. In this paper we generalise the notion of local resilience to $H$-resilience and demonstrate its usefulness on the containment problem of the …
A graph is $1$-planar if it has a drawing in the plane such that each edge is crossed at most once by another edge. Moreover, if this drawing has the additional property that for each crossing of two edges the end vertices of these edges induce a complete subgraph, then the graph is locally maximal $1$-planar. For a $3$-connected locally maximal $1$-planar graph $G$, we show the existence of a spanning $3$-connected planar subgraph and prove that $G$ is hamiltonian if $G$ has at most three $3$-vertex-cuts, and that $G$ is traceable if $G$ has at most four $3$-vertex-cuts. Moreover, infinitely …
A shortcut of a directed path $v_1 v_2 \cdots v_n$ is an edge $v_iv_j$ with $j > i+1$. If $j = i+2$ the shortcut is called a hop. If all hops are present, the path is called hop complete, so the path and its hops form a square of a path. We prove that every tournament with $n \ge 4$ vertices has a Hamiltonian path with at least $(4n-10)/7$ hops, and has a hop complete path of order at least $n^{0.295}$. A spanning binary tree of a tournament is a spanning shortcut tree if for every vertex of the tree, all its left descendants are in-neighbors and all its right descendants are out-neighbors. It…
Dirac subgraphs of powers of cycles are Hamiltonian
Departament de Matemàtiques, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya（加泰罗尼亚理工大学数学系）；Centre de Recerca Matemàtica（数学研究中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Fachbereich Mathematik, Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学数学系）；Department of Mathematics, Stanford University（斯坦福大学数学系）
The natural infinite analogue of a (finite) Hamilton cycle is a two-way-infinite Hamilton path (connected spanning 2-valent subgraph). Although it is known that every connected $2k$-valent infinite circulant graph has a two-way-infinite Hamilton path, there exist many such graphs that do not have a decomposition into $k$ edge-disjoint two-way-infinite Hamilton paths. This contrasts with the finite case where it is conjectured that every $2k$-valent connected circulant graph has a decomposition into $k$ edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. We settle the problem of decomposing $2k$-valent infinite cir…
Let $G$ be a graph obtained as the union of some $n$-vertex graph $H_n$ with minimum degree $δ(H_n)\geqαn$ and a $d$-dimensional random geometric graph $G^d(n,r)$. We investigate under which conditions for $r$ the graph $G$ will a.a.s. contain the $k$-th power of a Hamilton cycle, for any choice of $H_n$. We provide asymptotically optimal conditions for $r$ for all values of $α$, $d$ and $k$. This has applications in the containment of other spanning structures, such as $F$-factors.
A rooted tree is called a $k$-ary tree, if all non-leaf vertices have exactly $k$ children, except possibly one non-leaf vertex has at most $k-1$ children. Denote by $h(k)$ the minimum integer such that every tournament of order at least $h(k)$ contains a $k$-ary spanning tree. It is well-known that every tournament contains a Hamiltonian path, which implies that $h(1)=1$. Lu et al. [J. Graph Theory {\bf 30}(1999) 167--176] proved the existence of $h(k)$, and showed that $h(2)=4$ and $h(3)=8$. The exact values of $h(k)$ remain unknown for $k\geq 4$. A result of Erdős on the domination number o…
Motivated to find the answers to some of the questions that have occurred in recent papers dealing with Hamiltonian cycles (abbreviated HCs) in some special classes of grid graphs we started the investigation of spanning unions of cycles, the so-called 2-factors, in these graphs (as a generalizations of HCs). For all the three types of graphs from the title and for any integer $m \geq 2$ we propose an algorithm for obtaining a specially designed (transfer) digraph ${\cal D}^*_m$. The problem of enumeration of 2-factors is reduced to the problem of enumerating oriented walks in this digraph. Co…
We describe and analyse a simple greedy algorithm \2G\ that finds a good 2-matching $M$ in the random graph $G=G_{n,cn}^{\d\geq 3}$ when $c\geq 15$. A 2-matching is a spanning subgraph of maximum degree two and $G$ is drawn uniformly from graphs with vertex set $[n]$, $cn$ edges and minimum degree at least three. By good we mean that $M$ has $O(\log n)$ components. We then use this 2-matching to build a Hamilton cycle in $O(n^{1.5+o(1)})$ time \whp.
We consider sufficient conditions for the existence of $k$-th powers of Hamiltonian cycles in $n$-vertex graphs $G$ with minimum degree $μn$ for arbitrarily small $μ>0$. About 20 years ago Komlós, Sarközy, and Szemerédi resolved the conjectures of Pósa and Seymour and obtained optimal minimum degree conditions for this problem by showing that $μ=\frac{k}{k+1}$ suffices for large $n$. For smaller values of $μ$ the given graph $G$ must satisfy additional assumptions. We show that inducing subgraphs of density $d>0$ on linear subsets of vertices and being inseparable, in the sense that every cut …
We present a general method for counting and packing Hamilton cycles in dense graphs and oriented graphs, based on permanent estimates. We utilize this approach to prove several extremal results. In particular, we show that every nearly $cn$-regular oriented graph on $n$ vertices with $c>3/8$ contains $(cn/e)^n(1+o(1))^n$ directed Hamilton cycles. This is an extension of a result of Cuckler, who settled an old conjecture of Thomassen about the number of Hamilton cycles in regular tournaments. We also prove that every graph $G$ on $n$ vertices of minimum degree at least $(1/2+\varepsilon)n$ con…
We study the existence of hamiltonian cycles in plane cubic graphs G having a facial 2-factor Q. Thus hamiltonicity in G is transformed into the existence of a (quasi) spanning tree of faces in the contraction G/Q. In particular, we study the case where G is the leapfrog extension (called vertex envelope in (Discrete Math., 309(14):4793-4809, 2009)) of a plane cubic graph G_0. As a consequence we prove hamiltonicity in the leapfrog extension of planar cubic cyclically 4-edge-connected bipartite graphs. This and other results of this paper establish partial solutions of Barnette's Conjecture ac…
We study the model $G_α\cup G(n,p)$ of randomly perturbed dense graphs, where $G_α$ is any $n$-vertex graph with minimum degree at least $αn$ and $G(n,p)$ is the binomial random graph. We introduce a general approach for studying the appearance of spanning subgraphs in this model using absorption. This approach yields simpler proofs of several known results. We also use it to derive the following two new results. For every $α>0$ and $Δ\ge 5$, and every $n$-vertex graph $F$ with maximum degree at most $Δ$, we show that if $p=ω(n^{-2/(Δ+1)})$ then $G_α\cup G(n,p)$ with high probability contains …
Let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of graphs. The Turán number $ex(n;\mathcal{F})$ is defined to be the maximum number of edges in a graph of order $n$ that is $\mathcal{F}$-free. In 1959, Erdős and Gallai determined the Turán number of $M_{k+1}$ (a matching of size $k+1$) as follows: \[ ex(n;M_{k+1})= \max\left\{\binom{2k+1}{2},\binom{n}{2}-\binom{n-k}{2}\right\}. \] Since then, there has been a lot of research on Turán number of linear forests. A linear forest is a graph whose connected components are all paths or isolated vertices. Let $\mathcal{L}_{n,k}$ be the family of all linear forests of o…
We give a new proof of the Skeletal Lemma, which is the main technical tool in our paper on Hamilton cycles in line graphs [T. Kaiser and P. Vrána, Hamilton cycles in 5-connected line graphs, European J. Combin. 33 (2012), 924-947]. It generalises results on disjoint spanning trees in graphs to the context of 3-hypergraphs. The lemma is proved in a slightly stronger version that is more suitable for applications. The proof is simplified and formulated in a more accessible way.
We study the number of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles one can guarantee in a sufficiently large graph G on n vertices with minimum degree d = (1/2+a)n. For any constant a > 0, we give an optimal answer in the following sense: let reg_even(n,d) denote the degree of the largest even-regular spanning subgraph one can guarantee in a graph on n vertices with minimum degree d. Then the number of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles we find equals reg_even(n,d)/2. The value of reg_even(n,d) is known for infinitely many values of n and d. We also extend our results to graphs G of minimum degree d >= n/2, unle…
In 1962, Pósa conjectured that a graph $G=(V, E)$ contains a square of a Hamiltonian cycle if $δ(G)\ge 2n/3$. Only more than thirty years later Komlós, Sárkőzy, and Szemerédi proved this conjecture using the so-called Blow-Up Lemma. Here we extend their result to a random graph setting. We show that for every $ε> 0$ and $p=n^{-1/2+ε}$ a.a.s. every subgraph of $G_{n,p}$ with minimum degree at least $(2/3+ε)np$ contains the square of a cycle on $(1-o(1))n$ vertices. This is almost best possible in three ways: (1) for $p\ll n^{-1/2}$ the random graph will not contain any square of a long cycle (2…
A famous result by Rödl, Ruciński, and Szemerédi guarantees a (tight) Hamilton cycle in $k$-uniform hypergraphs $H$ on $n$ vertices with minimum $(k-1)$-degree $δ_{k-1}(H)\geq (1/2+o(1))n$, thereby extending Dirac's result from graphs to hypergraphs. For graphs, much more is known; each graph on $n$ vertices with $δ(G)\geq (1/2+o(1))n$ contains $(1-o(1))r$ edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles where $r$ is the largest integer such that $G$ contains a spanning $2r$-regular subgraph, which is clearly asymptotically optimal. This was proved by Ferber, Krivelevich, and Sudakov answering a question raised …
In this paper the problem of finding various spanning structures in random hypergraphs is studied. We notice that a general result of Riordan [Spanning subgraphs of random graphs, Combinatorics, Probability & Computing 9 (2000), no. 2, 125-148] can be adapted from random graphs to random $r$-uniform hypergaphs and provide sufficient conditions when a random $r$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal{H}^{(r)}(n,p)$ contains a given spanning structure a.a.s. We also discuss several spanning structures such as cube-hypergraphs, lattices, spheres and Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs. Moreover, we study univer…
Let $H_{n,p,r}^{(k)}$ denote a randomly colored random hypergraph, constructed on the vertex set $[n]$ by taking each $k$-tuple independently with probability $p$, and then independently coloring it with a random color from the set $[r]$. Let $H$ be a $k$-uniform hypergraph of order $n$. An $\ell$-Hamilton cycle is a spanning subhypergraph $C$ of $H$ with $n/(k-\ell)$ edges and such that for some cyclic ordering of the vertices each edge of $C$ consists of $k$ consecutive vertices and every pair of adjacent edges in $C$ intersects in precisely $\ell$ vertices. In this note we study the existen…
Given a collection $\mathcal{G}=(G_1,\dots, G_h)$ of graphs on the same vertex set $V$ of size $n$, an $h$-edge graph $H$ on the vertex set $V$ is a $\mathcal{G}$-transversal if there exists a bijection $λ: E(H) \rightarrow [h]$ such that $e\in E(G_{λ(e)})$ for each $e\in E(H)$. The conditions on the minimum degree $δ(\mathcal{G})=\min_{i\in[h]}\{ δ(G_i)\}$ for finding a spanning $\mathcal{G}$-transversal isomorphic to a graph $H$ have been actively studied when $H$ is a Hamilton cycle, an $F$-factor, a spanning tree with maximum degree $o(n/\log n)$ and a power of a Hamilton cycle, etc. In th…
We derive improved upper bounds on the number of crossing-free straight-edge spanning cycles (also known as Hamiltonian tours and simple polygonizations) that can be embedded over any specific set of $N$ points in the plane. More specifically, we bound the ratio between the number of spanning cycles (or perfect matchings) that can be embedded over a point set and the number of triangulations that can be embedded over it. The respective bounds are $O(1.8181^N)$ for cycles and $O(1.1067^N)$ for matchings. These imply a new upper bound of $O(54.543^N)$ on the number of crossing-free straight-edge…
