Hamilton cycles in sparse robustly expanding digraphs

The notion of robust expansion has played a central role in the solution of several conjectures involving the packing of Hamilton cycles in graphs and directed graphs. These and other results usually rely on the fact that every robustly expanding (di)graph with suitably large minimum degree contains a Hamilton cycle. Previous proofs of this require Szemer\'edi's Regularity Lemma and so this fact can only be applied to dense, sufficiently large robust expanders. We give a proof that does not use the Regularity Lemma and, indeed, we can apply our result to suitable sparse robustly expanding digraphs.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

Hamilton cycles in quasirandom hypergraphs

We show that, for a natural notion of quasirandomness in $k$-uniform hypergraphs, any quasirandom $k$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices with constant edge density and minimum vertex degree $\Omega(n^{k-1})$ contains a loose Hamilton cycle. We also give a construction to show that a $k$-uniform hypergraph satisfying these conditions need not contain a Hamilton $\ell$-cycle if $k-\ell$ divides $k$. The remaining values of $\ell$ form an interesting open question.Comment: 18 pages. Accepted for publication in Random Structures & Algorithm

A Dirac-type theorem for arbitrary Hamiltonian HH-linked digraphs

Given any digraph $D$, let $\mathcal{P}(D)$ be the family of all directed paths in $D$, and let $H$ be a digraph with the arc set $A(H)=\{a_1, \ldots, a_k\}$. The digraph $D$ is called arbitrary Hamiltonian $H$-linked if for any injective mapping $f: V(H)\rightarrow V(D)$ and any integer set $\mathcal{N}=\{n_1, \ldots, n_k\}$ with $n_i\geq4$ for each $i\in\{1, \ldots, k\}$, there exists a mapping $g: A(H)\rightarrow \mathcal{P}(D)$ such that for every arc $a_i=uv$, $g(a_i)$ is a directed path from $f(u)$ to $f(v)$ of length $n_i$, and different arcs are mapped into internally vertex-disjoint directed paths in $D$, and $\bigcup_{i\in[k]}V(g(a_i))=V(D)$. In this paper, we prove that for any digraph $H$ with $k$ arcs and $\delta(H)\geq1$, every digraph of sufficiently large order $n$ with minimum in- and out-degree at least $n/2+k$ is arbitrary Hamiltonian $H$-linked. Furthermore, we show that the lower bound is best possible. Our main result extends some work of K\"{u}hn and Osthus et al. \cite{20081,20082} and Ferrara, Jacobson and Pfender \cite{Jacobson}. Besides, as a corollary of our main theorem, we solve a conjecture of Wang \cite{Wang} for sufficiently large graphs

Cycle partitions of regular graphs

Magnant and Martin conjectured that the vertex set of any $d$-regular graph $G$ on $n$ vertices can be partitioned into $n / (d+1)$ paths (there exists a simple construction showing that this bound would be best possible). We prove this conjecture when $d = \Omega(n)$, improving a result of Han, who showed that in this range almost all vertices of $G$ can be covered by $n / (d+1) + 1$ vertex-disjoint paths. In fact, our proof gives a partition of $V(G)$ into cycles. We also show that, if $d = \Omega(n)$ and $G$ is bipartite, then $V(G)$ can be partitioned into $n / (2d)$ paths (this bound in tight for bipartite graphs).Comment: 31 pages, 1 figur

Decomposing tournaments into paths

We consider a generalisation of Kelly's conjecture which is due to Alspach, Mason, and Pullman from 1976. Kelly's conjecture states that every regular tournament has an edge decomposition into Hamilton cycles, and this was proved by Kühn and Osthus for large tournaments. The conjecture of Alspach, Mason, and Pullman asks for the minimum number of paths needed in a path decomposition of a general tournament T . There is a natural lower bound for this number in terms of the degree sequence of T and it is conjectured that this bound is correct for tournaments of even order. Almost all cases of the conjecture are open and we prove many of them