English

Non-uniform degrees and rainbow versions of the Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture

Combinatorics 2024-07-16 v3

Abstract

The Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture (denoted below CHC) states that the directed girth (the smallest length of a directed cycle) dgirth(D)dgirth(D) of a directed graph DD on nn vertices is at most nδ+(D)\lceil \frac{n}{\delta^+(D)}\rceil, where δ+(D)\delta^+(D) is the minimum out-degree of~DD. We consider a version involving all out-degrees, not merely the minimum one, and prove that if DD does not contain a sink, then dgirth(D)2vV(D)1deg+(v)+1dgirth(D) \le 2 \sum_{v\in V(D)} \frac{1}{deg^+(v)+1}. In the spirit of a generalization of the CHC to rainbow cycles in \cite{ADH2019}, this suggests the conjecture that given non-empty sets F1,,FnF_1, \ldots,F_n of edges of KnK_n, there exists a rainbow cycle of length at most 21in1Fi+12\sum_{1\le i \le n}\frac{1}{|F_i|+1}. We prove a bit stronger result when 1Fi21\le |F_i|\le 2, thereby strengthening a result of DeVos et. al \cite{DDFGGHMM2021}. We prove a logarithmic bound on the rainbow girth in the case that the sets FiF_i are triangles.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2110.11183,
  title  = {Non-uniform degrees and rainbow versions of the Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture},
  author = {Ron Aharoni and Eli Berger and Maria Chudnovsky and He Guo and Shira Zerbib},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.11183},
  year   = {2024}
}