English

A unified half-integral Erd\H{o}s-P\'{o}sa theorem for cycles in graphs labelled by multiple abelian groups

Combinatorics 2026-01-16 v1

Abstract

Erd\H{o}s and P\'{o}sa proved in 1965 that there is a duality between the maximum size of a packing of cycles and the minimum size of a vertex set hitting all cycles. Such a duality does not hold if we restrict to odd cycles. However, in 1999, Reed proved an analogue for odd cycles by relaxing packing to half-integral packing. We prove a far-reaching generalisation of the theorem of Reed; if the edges of a graph are labelled by finitely many abelian groups, then there is a duality between the maximum size of a half-integral packing of cycles whose values avoid a fixed finite set for each abelian group and the minimum size of a vertex set hitting all such cycles. A multitude of natural properties of cycles can be encoded in this setting, for example cycles of length at least \ell, cycles of length pp modulo qq, cycles intersecting a prescribed set of vertices at least tt times, and cycles contained in given Z2\mathbb{Z}_2-homology classes in a graph embedded on a fixed surface. Our main result allows us to prove a duality theorem for cycles satisfying a fixed set of finitely many such properties.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2102.01986,
  title  = {A unified half-integral Erd\H{o}s-P\'{o}sa theorem for cycles in graphs labelled by multiple abelian groups},
  author = {J. Pascal Gollin and Kevin Hendrey and Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi and O-joung Kwon and Sang-il Oum},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.01986},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

28 pages, 4 figures