English

Cycle decompositions of cartesian products of two cycles

Combinatorics 2023-10-23 v1

Abstract

We say a graph HH decomposes a graph GG if there exists a partition of the edges of GG into subgraphs isomorphic to HH. We seek to characterize necessary and sufficient conditions for a cycle of length kk, denoted CkC_k, to decompose the Cartesian product of two cycles Cm  CnC_m ~\square~ C_n. We prove that if mm is a multiple of 3, then the Cartesian product of a cycle CmC_m and any other cycle can be decomposed into 3 cycles of equal length. This extends work of Kotzig, who proved in 1973 that the Cartesian product of two cycles can always be decomposed into two cycles of equal length. We also show that if kk, mm, and nn are positive, and kk divides 4mn4mn then C4kC_{4k} decomposes C4m  C4nC_{4m} ~\square~ C_{4n}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.13493,
  title  = {Cycle decompositions of cartesian products of two cycles},
  author = {Moriah Aberle and Sarah Gold and Rivkah Moshe and David Offner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.13493},
  year   = {2023}
}