Decomposing graphs of high minimum degree into 4-cycles

If a graph G decomposes into edge-disjoint 4-cycles, then each vertex of G has even degree and 4 divides the number of edges in G. It is shown that these obvious necessary conditions are also sufficient when G is any simple graph having minimum degree at least (3132+on(1))n, where n is the number of vertices in G. This improves the bound given by Gustavsson (PhD Thesis, University of Stockholm, 1991), who showed (as part of a more general result) sufficiency for simple graphs with minimum degree at least (1-10-94+on(1))n. On the other hand, it is known that for arbitrarily large values of n there exist simple graphs satisfying the obvious necessary conditions, having n vertices and minimum degree 35n-1, but having no decomposition into edge-disjoint 4-cycles. We also show that if G is a bipartite simple graph with n vertices in each part, then the obvious necessary conditions for G to decompose into 4-cycles are sufficient when G has minimum degree at least (3132+on(1))n

Decomposing dense bipartite graphs into 4-cycles

Let G be an even bipartite graph with partite sets X and Y such that |Y | is even and the minimum degree of a vertex in Y is at least 95|X|/96. Suppose furthermore that the number of edges in G is divisible by 4. Then G decomposes into 4-cycles

Hamilton decompositions of regular tournaments

We show that every sufficiently large regular tournament can almost completely be decomposed into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. More precisely, for each \eta>0 every regular tournament G of sufficiently large order n contains at least (1/2-\eta)n edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. This gives an approximate solution to a conjecture of Kelly from 1968. Our result also extends to almost regular tournaments.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures. Added section sketching how we can extend our main result. To appear in the Proceedings of the LM