English

Linearly many rainbow trees in properly edge-coloured complete graphs

Combinatorics 2018-03-20 v3

Abstract

A subgraph of an edge-coloured complete graph is called rainbow if all its edges have different colours. The study of rainbow decompositions has a long history, going back to the work of Euler on Latin squares. In this paper we discuss three problems about decomposing complete graphs into rainbow trees: the Brualdi-Hollingsworth Conjecture, Constantine's Conjecture, and the Kaneko-Kano-Suzuki Conjecture. We show that in every proper edge-colouring of KnK_n there are 106n10^{-6}n edge-disjoint spanning isomorphic rainbow trees. This simultaneously improves the best known bounds on all these conjectures. Using our method we also show that every properly (n1)(n-1)-edge-coloured KnK_n has n/9n/9 edge-disjoint rainbow trees, giving further improvement on the Brualdi-Hollingsworth Conjecture.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.07301,
  title  = {Linearly many rainbow trees in properly edge-coloured complete graphs},
  author = {Alexey Pokrovskiy and Benny Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.07301},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:52:46.777Z