English

On the Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture with forbidden subgraphs

Combinatorics 2012-08-20 v2

Abstract

The Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture made in 1978 asserts that every orgraph on n vertices without oriented cycles of length <= l must contain a vertex of outdegree at most (n-1)/l. It has a rather elaborate set of (conjectured) extremal configurations. In this paper we consider the case l=3 that received quite a significant attention in the literature. We identify three orgraphs on four vertices each that are missing as an induced subgraph in all known extremal examples and prove the Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture for orgraphs missing as induced subgraphs any of these orgraphs, along with cycles of length 3. Using a standard trick, we can also lift the restriction of being induced, although this makes graphs in our list slightly more complicated.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1107.2247,
  title  = {On the Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture with forbidden subgraphs},
  author = {Alexander Razborov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.2247},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

Referees' comments (the paper has been accepted to "Journal of Graph Theory") have been taken into account. Most notably, an annoying misprint in the proof of Claim 5.6 (K_{1,2} should everywhere read K_{2,1}) has been fixed

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:35:28.224Z