English

Transitive path decompositions of Cartesian products of complete graphs

Combinatorics 2026-05-26 v2 Group Theory

Abstract

An HH-decomposition of a graph Γ\Gamma is a partition of its edge set into subgraphs isomorphic to HH. A transitive decomposition is a special kind of HH-decomposition that is highly symmetrical in the sense that the subgraphs (copies of HH) are preserved and transitively permuted by a group of automorphisms of Γ\Gamma. This paper concerns transitive HH-decompositions of the graph KnKnK_n \Box K_n where HH is a path. When nn is an odd prime, we present a construction for a transitive path decomposition where the paths in the decomposition are considerably large compared to the number of vertices. Our main result supports well-known Gallai's conjecture and an extended version of Ringel's conjecture.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.07684,
  title  = {Transitive path decompositions of Cartesian products of complete graphs},
  author = {Ajani De Vas Gunasekara and Alice Devillers},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.07684},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

15 pages, 4 figures