English

Rainbow triangles in arc-colored digraphs

Combinatorics 2018-10-16 v1

Abstract

Let DD be an arc-colored digraph. The arc number a(D)a(D) of DD is defined as the number of arcs of DD. The color number c(D)c(D) of DD is defined as the number of colors assigned to the arcs of DD. A rainbow triangle in DD is a directed triangle in which every pair of arcs have distinct colors. Let f(D)f(D) be the smallest integer such that if c(D)f(D)c(D)\geq f(D), then DD contains a rainbow triangle. In this paper we obtain f(Kn)f(\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n}) and f(Tn)f(T_n), where Kn\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n} is a complete digraph of order nn and TnT_n is a strongly connected tournament of order nn. Moreover we characterize the arc-colored complete digraph Kn\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n} with c(Kn)=f(Kn)1c(\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n})=f(\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n})-1 and containing no rainbow triangles. We also prove that an arc-colored digraph DD on nn vertices contains a rainbow triangle when a(D)+c(D)a(Kn)+f(Kn)a(D)+c(D)\geq a(\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n})+f(\overleftrightarrow{K}_{n}), which is a directed extension of the undirected case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.05960,
  title  = {Rainbow triangles in arc-colored digraphs},
  author = {Wei Li and Shenggui Zhang and Ruonan Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.05960},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:38:49.852Z