English

Chain--collider--fork Decompositions of Transitive Tournament

Combinatorics 2026-05-26 v1

Abstract

A transitive tournament is an acyclic orientation of a complete graph. We study decompositions and packings of the transitive tournament TTnTT_n into connected two-arc motifs. The three motifs considered are chains, colliders, and forks, which are also fundamental local configurations in directed acyclic graphs. We first construct decompositions of TTnTT_n into mixtures of these motifs whenever such decompositions exist. We then consider the corresponding pure packing problem for each individual motif. For HH equal to a chain, a collider, or a fork, we determine the maximum number of arc-disjoint copies of HH in TTnTT_n. These results give a precise extremal description of two-arc motif packings in transitive tournaments and suggest further questions on motif decompositions in broader classes of directed acyclic graphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.24801,
  title  = {Chain--collider--fork Decompositions of Transitive Tournament},
  author = {Ajani De Vas Gunasekara},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24801},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 6 figures