English

Short rainbow cycles in edge-colored graphs

Combinatorics 2023-11-22 v1 Probability

Abstract

A famous conjecture of Caccetta and H\"{a}ggkvist (CHC) states that a directed graph DD with nn vertices and minimum outdegree at least rr has a directed cycle of length at most nr\lceil \frac{n}{r}\rceil. In 2017, Aharoni proposed the following generalization: an edge-colored graph GG with nn vertices, nn color classes of size at least rr has a rainbow cycle of length at most nr\lceil \frac{n}{r}\rceil. Since CHC can be seen as the case of Aharoni's Conjecture: color classes in the color partition are monochromatic stars centered at distinct vertices, one way to study Aharoni's Conjecture is to structure the color classes as each color class is either a star, a triangle or contains a matching of size 2. Guo improved the upper bound in Aharoni's Conjecture to O(logn)O(\log n) in some mixed cases when the color classes are not necessarily stars. In this paper, we extend Guo's results. Our main result is as follows: Let GG an edge-colored graph on nn vertices and nn color classes, if at least αn\alpha n color classes are either a matching of size 2 or a triangle for α>12\alpha >\frac{1}{2}, then GG contains a rainbow cycle of length O(logn)O(\log n). We also prove that the logn\log n bound is the right order of magnitude.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.12302,
  title  = {Short rainbow cycles in edge-colored graphs},
  author = {Xiaozheng Chen and Shanshan Guo and Fei Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.12302},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:26:53.853Z