English

Edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles under a bipartite-hole condition

Combinatorics 2026-07-06 v1

Abstract

In 2017, McDiarmid and Yolov introduced the bipartite-hole-number α~(G)\widetilde{\alpha}(G) and proved that δ(G)α~(G)\delta(G)\ge \widetilde{\alpha}(G) forces a Hamilton cycle. They also gave a sufficient condition for packing edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, and asked whether this condition is sharp or can be relaxed. For integers a,k2a,k\ge 2, let f(a,k)f(a,k) be the least integer dd such that every graph GG on at least three vertices with α~(G)a\widetilde{\alpha}(G)\le a and δ(G)d\delta(G)\ge d contains kk pairwise edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. We prove that f(a,k)=Θ(a+k+aklog(k+2)).f(a,k)=\Theta\left(a+k+\frac{ak}{\log(k+2)}\right). The upper bound uses a deletion lemma for the bipartite-hole-number together with the McDiarmid--Yolov Hamiltonicity theorem and a greedy packing argument. The lower bound is obtained from three extremal constructions, the logarithmic one using a sparse random auxiliary graph with no prescribed bipartite hole.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.05027,
  title  = {Edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles under a bipartite-hole condition},
  author = {Yanan Hu and Chengli Li and Feng Liu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.05027},
  year   = {2026}
}