Decomposability of graphs into subgraphs fulfilling the 1-2-3 Conjecture

The well-known 1-2-3 Conjecture asserts that the edges of every graph without isolated edges can be weighted with $1$, $2$ and $3$ so that adjacent vertices receive distinct weighted degrees. This is open in general. We prove that every $d$-regular graph, $d\geq 2$, can be decomposed into at most $2$ subgraphs (without isolated edges) fulfilling the 1-2-3 Conjecture if $d\notin\{10,11,12,13,15,17\}$, and into at most $3$ such subgraphs in the remaining cases. Additionally, we prove that in general every graph without isolated edges can be decomposed into at most $24$ subgraphs fulfilling the 1-2-3 Conjecture, improving the previously best upper bound of $40$. Both results are partly based on applications of the Lov\'asz Local Lemma.Comment: 13 page

Decomposability of graphs into subgraphs fulfilling the 1-2-3 Conjecture

International audienceThe well-known 1-2-3 Conjecture asserts that the edges of every graph without isolated edges can be weighted with 1, 2 and 3 so that adjacent vertices receive distinct weighted degrees. This is open in general. We prove that every d-regular graph, d ≥ 2, can be decomposed into at most 2 subgraphs (without isolated edges) fulfilling the 1-2-3 Conjecture if d not in {10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17}, and into at most 3 such subgraphs in the remaining cases. Additionally, we prove that in general every graph without isolated edges can be decomposed into at most 24 subgraphs fulfilling the 1-2-3 Conjecture, improving the previously best upper bound of 40. Both results are partly based on applications of the Lovász Local Lemma

A general decomposition theory for the 1-2-3 Conjecture and locally irregular decompositions

International audienceHow can one distinguish the adjacent vertices of a graph through an edge-weighting? In the last decades, this question has been attracting increasing attention, which resulted in the active field of distinguishing labellings. One of its most popular problems is the one where neighbours must be distinguishable via their incident sums of weights. An edge-weighting verifying this is said neighbour-sum-distinguishing. The popularity of this notion arises from two reasons. A first one is that designing a neighbour-sum-distinguishing edge-weighting showed up to be equivalent to turning a simple graph into a locally irregular (i.e., without neighbours with the same degree) multigraph by adding parallel edges, which is motivated by the concept of irregularity in graphs. Another source of popularity is probably the influence of the famous 1-2-3 Conjecture, which claims that such weightings with weights in {1,2,3} exist for graphs with no isolated edge. The 1-2-3 Conjecture has recently been investigated from a decompositional angle, via so-called locally irregular decompositions, which are edge-partitions into locally irregular subgraphs. Through several recent studies, it was shown that this concept is quite related to the 1-2-3 Conjecture. However, the full connexion between all those concepts was not clear. In this work, we propose an approach that generalizes all concepts above, involving coloured weights and sums. As a consequence, we get another interpretation of several existing results related to the 1-2-3 Conjecture. We also come up with new related conjectures, to which we give some support

Decomposing degenerate graphs into locally irregular subgraphs

International audienceA (undirected) graph is locally irregular if no two of its adjacent vertices have the same degree. A decomposition of a graph G into k locally irregular subgraphs is a partition E_1,...,E_k of E(G) into k parts each of which induces a locally irregular subgraph. Not all graphs decompose into locally irregular subgraphs; however, it was conjectured that, whenever a graph does, it should admit such a decomposition into at most three locally irregular subgraphs. This conjecture was verified for a few graph classes in recent years.This work is dedicated to the decomposability of degenerate graphs with low degeneracy. Our main result is that decomposable k-degenerate graphs decompose into at most 3k+1 locally irregular subgraphs, which improves on previous results whenever k≤9. We improve this result further for some specific classes of degenerate graphs, such as bipartite cacti, k-trees, and planar graphs. Although our results provide only little progress towards the leading conjecture above, the main contribution of this work is rather the decomposition schemes and methods we introduce to prove these results