English

Extremal problems on disjoint path covers of graphs

Combinatorics 2026-07-09 v1

Abstract

In 1962, Erd\H{o}s characterized the maximum size of nonhamiltonian graphs of order nn with minimum degree at least kk. Later, Ning and Peng [Combin. Probab. Comput. 29 (2020) 128-136] extended Erd\H{o}s's results to the clique condition and provided the maximum clique number for nonhamiltonian graphs of order nn with minimum degree at least kk. Recently, Zhang [European J. Combin. 112 (2023) 103728] determined the maximum number of ss-cliques in nonhamiltonian graphs with prescribed order and minimum degree. A natural extension is to characterize the maximum number of ss-cliques under other graph properties. Notably, disjoint path cover problems are closely related to Hamiltonicity. In this paper, we generalize results on Hamiltonicity and establish sufficient conditions for a graph to possess one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many tt-disjoint path covers in terms of the number of cliques and the α\alpha-spectral radius, respectively. Furthermore, we characterize the extremal graphs that attain these bounds respectively.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.08062,
  title  = {Extremal problems on disjoint path covers of graphs},
  author = {Shujie Chen and Tao Tian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.08062},
  year   = {2026}
}