Tiling in bipartite graphs with asymmetric minimum degrees

Abstract

The problem of determining the optimal minimum degree condition for a balanced bipartite graph on 2ms vertices to contain m vertex disjoint copies of K_{s,s} was solved by Zhao. Later Hladk\'y and Schacht, and Czygrinow and DeBiasio determined the optimal minimum degree condition for a balanced bipartite graph on 2m(s+t) vertices to contain m vertex disjoint copies of K_{s,t} for fixed positive integers s<t. For a balanced bipartite graph G[U,V], let \delta_U be the minimum degree over all vertices in U and \delta_V be the minimum degree over all vertices in V. We consider the problem of determining the optimal value of \delta_U+\delta_V which guarantees that G can be tiled with K_{s,s}. We show that the optimal value depends on D:=|\delta_V-\delta_U|. When D is small, we show that \delta_U+\delta_V\geq n+3s-5 is best possible. As D becomes larger, we show that \delta_U+\delta_V can be made smaller, but no smaller than n+2s-2s^{1/2}. However, when D=n-C for some constant C, we show that there exist graphs with \delta_U+\delta_V\geq n+s^{s^{1/3}} which cannot be tiled with K_{s,s}.Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures. This is the unabridged version of the paper, containing the full proof of Theorem 1.7. The case when |\delta_U-\delta_V| is small and s>2 involves a lengthy case analysis, spanning pages 20-32; this section is not included in the "journal version