English

Short rainbow cycles for families of matchings and triangles

Combinatorics 2024-09-25 v3 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

A generalization of the famous Caccetta--H\"aggkvist conjecture, suggested by Aharoni [Rainbow triangles and the Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture, J. Graph Theory (2019)], is that any family F=(F1,,Fn)\mathcal{F}=(F_1, \ldots,F_n) of sets of edges in KnK_n, each of size kk, has a rainbow cycle of length at most nk\lceil \frac{n}{k}\rceil. In [Rainbow cycles for families of matchings, Israel J. Math. (2023)] and [Non-uniform degrees and rainbow versions of the Caccetta-H\"aggkvist conjecture, SIAM J. Discrete Math. (2023)] it was shown that asymptotically this can be improved to O(logn)O(\log n) if all sets are matchings of size 2, or all are triangles. We show that the same is true in the mixed case, i.e., if each FiF_i is either a matching of size 2 or a triangle. We also study the case that each FiF_i is a matching of size 2 or a single edge, or each FiF_i is a triangle or a single edge, and in each of these cases we determine the threshold proportion between the types, beyond which the rainbow girth goes from linear to logarithmic.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2210.12243,
  title  = {Short rainbow cycles for families of matchings and triangles},
  author = {He Guo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.12243},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

10 pages; minor edits; added a simplified proof and an alternative proof; to appear in the Journal of Graph Theory