English

Large flames in rooted acyclic digraphs without backward-infinite paths

Combinatorics 2025-12-01 v1

Abstract

An rr-rooted digraph is a flame if for each non-root vertex vv, there is a set of edge-disjoint directed paths from rr to vv that covers all ingoing edges of vv. The study of flames was initiated by Lov\'asz, who showed that in a finite rooted digraph, the edge-minimal subgraphs that preserve all local edge-connectivities from the root are always flames. It is known that the edge sets of the flame subgraphs of any finite rooted digraph form a greedoid. Szeszl\'er showed recently that if the digraph is acyclic, then the bases of this greedoid are the bases of a matroid. We show that a suitable formulation of Szeszl\'er's theorem is valid for infinite digraphs under the additional assumption that there are no backward-infinite directed paths (which assumption is indeed essential). We also prove that the ''correct'' infinite generalisation of Lov\'asz's theorem also holds for this class of digraphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.22140,
  title  = {Large flames in rooted acyclic digraphs without backward-infinite paths},
  author = {Attila Joó and Qiuzhenyu Tao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.22140},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

8 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:57:33.142Z