English

Uniquely 2-colourable 4-cycle decompositions

Combinatorics 2026-05-15 v1

Abstract

A cycle system of order nn is a decomposition of the edges of the complete graph KnK_n into cycles of a fixed length. A cycle system is said to be kk-colourable if we can assign kk colours to its vertices so that no cycle is monochromatic. A kk-colourable cycle system is uniquely kk-colourable if its colouring is unique up to the permutation of colour classes. In this paper, we construct uniquely 22-colourable 44-cycle systems of order nn for all admissible n49n\geq 49, and also uniquely 22-colourable 44-cycle decompositions of KnIK_n - I, for all admissible n50n \geq 50. These constructions contribute to the broader study of uniquely colourable cycle systems and open new directions for future research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.14804,
  title  = {Uniquely 2-colourable 4-cycle decompositions},
  author = {Andrea C. Burgess and David A. Pike and Shahriyar Pourakbar-Saffar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14804},
  year   = {2026}
}