English

Minimizing cycles in tournaments and normalized $q$-norms

Combinatorics 2020-12-01 v1

Abstract

Akin to the Erd\H{o}s-Rademacher problem, Linial and Morgenstern made the following conjecture in tournaments: for any d(0,1]d\in (0,1], among all nn-vertex tournaments with d(n3)d\binom{n}{3} many 3-cycles, the number of 4-cycles is asymptotically minimized by a special random blow-up of a transitive tournament. Recently, Chan, Grzesik, Kr\'al' and Noel introduced spectrum analysis of adjacency matrices of tournaments in this study, and confirmed this for d1/36d\geq 1/36. In this paper, we investigate the analogous problem of minimizing the number of cycles of a given length. We prove that for integers ≢2mod4\ell\not\equiv 2\mod 4, there exists some constant c>0c_\ell>0 such that if d1cd\geq 1-c_\ell, then the number of \ell-cycles is also asymptotically minimized by the same family of extremal examples for 44-cycles. In doing so, we answer a question of Linial and Morgenstern about minimizing the qq-norm of a probabilistic vector with given pp-norm for any integers q>p>1q>p>1. For integers 2mod4\ell\equiv 2\mod 4, however the same phenomena do not hold for \ell-cycles, for which we can construct an explicit family of tournaments containing fewer \ell-cycles for any given number of 33-cycles. We conclude by proposing two conjectures on the minimization problem for general cycles in tournaments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.14142,
  title  = {Minimizing cycles in tournaments and normalized $q$-norms},
  author = {Jie Ma and Tianyun Tang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.14142},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:34:11.747Z