English

Colour diversity in spanning structures under Dirac-type conditions

Combinatorics 2026-03-02 v1

Abstract

Finding spanning structures with many distinct colours in properly edge-coloured graphs is a central theme in extremal combinatorics. A classical result of Andersen shows that every proper edge-colouring of the complete graph KnK_n contains a Hamilton cycle with nO(n1/2)n - O(n^{1/2}) distinct colours. In the bipartite setting, the analogous question for perfect matchings is closely related to permutations in Latin squares. In this paper, we investigate how a Dirac-type minimum degree condition forces colour diversity in spanning structures. For every constant 1/2<c11/2 < c \le 1, we prove the following. \bullet Every properly edge-coloured graph GG on nn vertices with δ(G)cn\delta(G)\ge cn contains a Hamilton cycle with at least cnO(n1/2)cn - O(n^{1/2}) distinct colours. \bullet Every subset of an n×nn\times n Latin square with at least cncn cells in each row and each column contains a permutation with at least cnO(n2/3)cn - O(n^{2/3}) distinct symbols. Both bounds are best possible up to the error term.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.23801,
  title  = {Colour diversity in spanning structures under Dirac-type conditions},
  author = {Xinbu Cheng and Xinqi Huang and Hong Liu and Bin Wang and Zhifei Yan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.23801},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:55:14.296Z