English

The absence of monochromatic triangle implies various properly colored spanning trees

Combinatorics 2026-04-02 v3

Abstract

An edge-colored graph GG is called properly colored if every two adjacent edges are assigned different colors. A monochromatic triangle is a cycle of length 3 with all the edges having the same color. Given a tree T0T_0, let T(n,T0)\mathcal{T}(n,T_0) be the collection of nn-vertex trees that are subdivisions of T0T_0. It is conjectured that for each fixed tree T0T_0, there is a function f(T0)f(T_0) such that for each integer nf(T0)n\geq f(T_0) and each TT(n,T0)T\in \mathcal{T}(n,T_0), every edge-colored complete graph KnK_n without containing monochromatic triangle must contain a properly colored copy of TT. We confirm the conjecture in the case that T0T_0 is a star. A weaker version of the above conjecture is also obtained. Moreover, to get a nice quantitative estimation of f(T0)f(T_0) when T0T_0 is a star requires determining the constraint Ramsey number of a monochromatic triangle and a rainbow star, which is of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.09082,
  title  = {The absence of monochromatic triangle implies various properly colored spanning trees},
  author = {Ruonan Li and Ruhui Lu and Xueli Su and Shenggui Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.09082},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:19:36.490Z