Decompositions of complete graphs into bipartite 2-regular subgraphs

It is shown that if G is any bipartite 2-regular graph of order at most n/2 or at least n – 2, then the obvious necessary conditions are sufficient for the existence of a decomposition of the complete graph of order n into a perfect matching and edge-disjoint copies of G

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

Decomposing Cubic Graphs into Connected Subgraphs of Size Three

Let $S=\{K_{1,3},K_3,P_4\}$ be the set of connected graphs of size 3. We study the problem of partitioning the edge set of a graph $G$ into graphs taken from any non-empty $S'\subseteq S$. The problem is known to be NP-complete for any possible choice of $S'$ in general graphs. In this paper, we assume that the input graph is cubic, and study the computational complexity of the problem of partitioning its edge set for any choice of $S'$. We identify all polynomial and NP-complete problems in that setting, and give graph-theoretic characterisations of $S'$-decomposable cubic graphs in some cases.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of COCOON 201

Rainbow Hamilton cycles in random regular graphs

A rainbow subgraph of an edge-coloured graph has all edges of distinct colours. A random d-regular graph with d even, and having edges coloured randomly with d/2 of each of n colours, has a rainbow Hamilton cycle with probability tending to 1 as n tends to infinity, provided d is at least 8.Comment: 16 page

Decompositions into subgraphs of small diameter

We investigate decompositions of a graph into a small number of low diameter subgraphs. Let P(n,\epsilon,d) be the smallest k such that every graph G=(V,E) on n vertices has an edge partition E=E_0 \cup E_1 \cup ... \cup E_k such that |E_0| \leq \epsilon n^2 and for all 1 \leq i \leq k the diameter of the subgraph spanned by E_i is at most d. Using Szemer\'edi's regularity lemma, Polcyn and Ruci\'nski showed that P(n,\epsilon,4) is bounded above by a constant depending only \epsilon. This shows that every dense graph can be partitioned into a small number of ``small worlds'' provided that few edges can be ignored. Improving on their result, we determine P(n,\epsilon,d) within an absolute constant factor, showing that P(n,\epsilon,2) = \Theta(n) is unbounded for \epsilon n^{-1/2} and P(n,\epsilon,4) = \Theta(1/\epsilon) for \epsilon > n^{-1}. We also prove that if G has large minimum degree, all the edges of G can be covered by a small number of low diameter subgraphs. Finally, we extend some of these results to hypergraphs, improving earlier work of Polcyn, R\"odl, Ruci\'nski, and Szemer\'edi.Comment: 18 page

On the decomposition threshold of a given graph

We study the $F$-decomposition threshold $\delta_F$ for a given graph $F$. Here an $F$-decomposition of a graph $G$ is a collection of edge-disjoint copies of $F$ in $G$ which together cover every edge of $G$. (Such an $F$-decomposition can only exist if $G$ is $F$-divisible, i.e. if $e(F)\mid e(G)$ and each vertex degree of $G$ can be expressed as a linear combination of the vertex degrees of $F$.) The $F$-decomposition threshold $\delta_F$ is the smallest value ensuring that an $F$-divisible graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with $\delta(G)\ge(\delta_F+o(1))n$ has an $F$-decomposition. Our main results imply the following for a given graph $F$, where $\delta_F^\ast$ is the fractional version of $\delta_F$ and $\chi:=\chi(F)$: (i) $\delta_F\le \max\{\delta_F^\ast,1-1/(\chi+1)\}$; (ii) if $\chi\ge 5$, then $\delta_F\in\{\delta_F^{\ast},1-1/\chi,1-1/(\chi+1)\}$; (iii) we determine $\delta_F$ if $F$ is bipartite. In particular, (i) implies that $\delta_{K_r}=\delta^\ast_{K_r}$. Our proof involves further developments of the recent `iterative' absorbing approach.Comment: Final version, to appear in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series