Decompositions of complete uniform hypergraphs into Hamilton Berge cycles

In 1973 Bermond, Germa, Heydemann and Sotteau conjectured that if $n$ divides $\binom{n}{k}$, then the complete $k$-uniform hypergraph on $n$ vertices has a decomposition into Hamilton Berge cycles. Here a Berge cycle consists of an alternating sequence $v_1,e_1,v_2,\dots,v_n,e_n$ of distinct vertices $v_i$ and distinct edges $e_i$ so that each $e_i$ contains $v_i$ and $v_{i+1}$. So the divisibility condition is clearly necessary. In this note, we prove that the conjecture holds whenever $k \ge 4$ and $n \ge 30$. Our argument is based on the Kruskal-Katona theorem. The case when $k=3$ was already solved by Verrall, building on results of Bermond

Hamilton cycles in graphs and hypergraphs: an extremal perspective

As one of the most fundamental and well-known NP-complete problems, the Hamilton cycle problem has been the subject of intensive research. Recent developments in the area have highlighted the crucial role played by the notions of expansion and quasi-randomness. These concepts and other recent techniques have led to the solution of several long-standing problems in the area. New aspects have also emerged, such as resilience, robustness and the study of Hamilton cycles in hypergraphs. We survey these developments and highlight open problems, with an emphasis on extremal and probabilistic approaches.Comment: to appear in the Proceedings of the ICM 2014; due to given page limits, this final version is slightly shorter than the previous arxiv versio

Euler tours in hypergraphs

We show that a quasirandom $k$-uniform hypergraph $G$ has a tight Euler tour subject to the necessary condition that $k$ divides all vertex degrees. The case when $G$ is complete confirms a conjecture of Chung, Diaconis and Graham from 1989 on the existence of universal cycles for the $k$-subsets of an $n$-set.Comment: version accepted for publication in Combinatoric

Completion and deficiency problems

Given a partial Steiner triple system (STS) of order $n$, what is the order of the smallest complete STS it can be embedded into? The study of this question goes back more than 40 years. In this paper we answer it for relatively sparse STSs, showing that given a partial STS of order $n$ with at most $r \le \varepsilon n^2$ triples, it can always be embedded into a complete STS of order $n+O(\sqrt{r})$, which is asymptotically optimal. We also obtain similar results for completions of Latin squares and other designs. This suggests a new, natural class of questions, called deficiency problems. Given a global spanning property $\mathcal{P}$ and a graph $G$, we define the deficiency of the graph $G$ with respect to the property $\mathcal{P}$ to be the smallest positive integer $t$ such that the join $G\ast K_t$ has property $\mathcal{P}$. To illustrate this concept we consider deficiency versions of some well-studied properties, such as having a $K_k$-decomposition, Hamiltonicity, having a triangle-factor and having a perfect matching in hypergraphs. The main goal of this paper is to propose a systematic study of these problems; thus several future research directions are also given

Packing tight Hamilton cycles in 3-uniform hypergraphs

Let H be a 3-uniform hypergraph with N vertices. A tight Hamilton cycle C \subset H is a collection of N edges for which there is an ordering of the vertices v_1, ..., v_N such that every triple of consecutive vertices {v_i, v_{i+1}, v_{i+2}} is an edge of C (indices are considered modulo N). We develop new techniques which enable us to prove that under certain natural pseudo-random conditions, almost all edges of H can be covered by edge-disjoint tight Hamilton cycles, for N divisible by 4. Consequently, we derive the corollary that random 3-uniform hypergraphs can be almost completely packed with tight Hamilton cycles w.h.p., for N divisible by 4 and P not too small. Along the way, we develop a similar result for packing Hamilton cycles in pseudo-random digraphs with even numbers of vertices.Comment: 31 pages, 1 figur

Decompositions of Complete Uniform Multipartite Hypergraphs

In recent years, researchers have studied the existence of complete uniform hypergraphs into small-order hypergraphs. In particular, results on small 3-uniform graphs including loose 3, 4, and 5 cycles have been studied, as well as 4-uniform loose cycles of length 3. As part of these studies, decompositions of multipartite hypergraphs were constructed. In this paper, we extend this work to higher uniformity and order as well as expand the class of hypergraphs