Proof of a tournament partition conjecture and an application to 1-factors with prescribed cycle lengths

In 1982 Thomassen asked whether there exists an integer f(k,t) such that every strongly f(k,t)-connected tournament T admits a partition of its vertex set into t vertex classes V_1,...,V_t such that for all i the subtournament T[V_i] induced on T by V_i is strongly k-connected. Our main result implies an affirmative answer to this question. In particular we show that f(k,t) = O(k^7 t^4) suffices. As another application of our main result we give an affirmative answer to a question of Song as to whether, for any integer t, there exists an integer h(t) such that every strongly h(t)-connected tournament has a 1-factor consisting of t vertex-disjoint cycles of prescribed lengths. We show that h(t) = O(t^5) suffices.Comment: final version, to appear in Combinatoric

On the number of 4-cycles in a tournament

If $T$ is an $n$-vertex tournament with a given number of $3$-cycles, what can be said about the number of its $4$-cycles? The most interesting range of this problem is where $T$ is assumed to have $c\cdot n^3$ cyclic triples for some $c>0$ and we seek to minimize the number of $4$-cycles. We conjecture that the (asymptotic) minimizing $T$ is a random blow-up of a constant-sized transitive tournament. Using the method of flag algebras, we derive a lower bound that almost matches the conjectured value. We are able to answer the easier problem of maximizing the number of $4$-cycles. These questions can be equivalently stated in terms of transitive subtournaments. Namely, given the number of transitive triples in $T$, how many transitive quadruples can it have? As far as we know, this is the first study of inducibility in tournaments.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure