English

Preorder induced by rainbow forbidden subgraphs

Combinatorics 2025-02-04 v1

Abstract

A subgraph HH of an edge-colored graph GG is rainbow if all the edges of HH receive different colors. If GG does not contain a rainbow subgraph isomorphic to HH, we say that GG is rainbow HH-free. For connected graphs H1H_1 and H2H_2, if every rainbow H1H_1-free edge-colored complete graph colored in sufficiently many colors is rainbow H2H_2-free, we write H1H2H_1\le H_2. The binary relation \le is reflexive and transitive, and hence it is a preorder. If H1H_1 is a subgraph of H2H_2, then trivially H1H2H_1\le H_2 holds. On the other hand, there exists a pair (H1,H2)(H_1, H_2) such that H1H_1 is a proper supergraph of H2H_2 and H1H2H_1\le H_2 holds. Cui et al.~[Discrete Math.~\textbf{344} (2021) Article Number 112267] characterized these pairs. In this paper, we investigate the pairs (H1,H2)(H_1, H_2) with H1H2H_1\le H_2 when neither H1H_1 nor H2H_2 is a subgraph of the other. We prove that there are many such pairs and investigate their structure with respect to \le.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.00667,
  title  = {Preorder induced by rainbow forbidden subgraphs},
  author = {Shun-ichi Maezawa and Akira Saito},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.00667},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:29:20.854Z