English

Edge-decomposition of graphs into copies of a tree with four edges

Combinatorics 2012-03-09 v1

Abstract

We study edge-decompositions of highly connected graphs into copies of a given tree. In particular we attack the following conjecture by Bar\'at and Thomassen: for each tree TT, there exists a natural number kTk_T such that if GG is a kTk_T-edge-connected graph, and E(T)|E(T)| divides E(G)|E(G)|, then E(G)E(G) has a decomposition into copies of TT. As one of our main results it is sufficient to prove the conjecture for bipartite graphs. Let YY be the unique tree with degree sequence (1,1,1,2,3)(1,1,1,2,3). We prove that if GG is a 191-edge-connected graph of size divisible by 4, then GG has a YY-decomposition. This is the first instance of such a theorem, in which the tree is different from a path or a star.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1203.1671,
  title  = {Edge-decomposition of graphs into copies of a tree with four edges},
  author = {János Barát and Dániel Gerbner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.1671},
  year   = {2012}
}