An approximate version of Jackson’s conjecture

A diregular bipartite tournament is a balanced complete bipartite graph whose edges are oriented so that every vertex has the same in- and out-degree. In 1981 Jackson showed that a diregular bipartite tournament contains a Hamilton cycle, and conjectured that in fact its edge set can be partitioned into Hamilton cycles. We prove an approximate version of this conjecture: for every ε > 0 there exists n0 such that every diregular bipartite tournament on 2n ≥ n0 vertices contains a collection of (1/2–ε)n cycles of length at least (2–ε)n. Increasing the degree by a small proportion allows us to prove the existence of many Hamilton cycles: for every c > 1/2 and ε > 0 there exists n0 such that every cn-regular bipartite digraph on 2n ≥ n0 vertices contains (1−ε)cn edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles.

Sparse Highly Connected Spanning Subgraphs in Dense Directed Graphs

Mader proved that every strongly k-connected n-vertex digraph contains a strongly k-connected spanning subgraph with at most 2kn - 2k2 edges, where equality holds for the complete bipartite digraph DKk,n-k. For dense strongly k-connected digraphs, this upper bound can be significantly improved. More precisely, we prove that every strongly k-connected n-vertex digraph D contains a strongly k-connected spanning subgraph with at most kn + 800k(k + Δ(D)) edges, where Δ(D) denotes the maximum degree of the complement of the underlying undirected graph of a digraph D. Here, the additional term 800k(k + Δ(D)) is tight up to multiplicative and additive constants. As a corollary, this implies that every strongly k-connected n-vertex semicomplete digraph contains a strongly k-connected spanning subgraph with at most kn + 800k2 edges, which is essentially optimal since 800k2 cannot be reduced to the number less than k(k - 1)/2.We also prove an analogous result for strongly k-arc-connected directed multigraphs. Both proofs yield polynomial-time algorithms.

On the Meyniel condition for hamiltonicity in bipartite digraphs

Graph Theory International audience We prove a sharp Meyniel-type criterion for hamiltonicity of a balanced bipartite digraph: For a≥2, a strongly connected balanced bipartite digraph D on 2a vertices is hamiltonian if d(u)+d(v)≥3a whenever uv∉A(D) and vu∉A(D). As a consequence, we obtain a sharp sufficient condition for hamiltonicity in terms of the minimal degree: a strongly connected balanced bipartite digraph D on 2a vertices is hamiltonian if δ(D)≥3a/2.

A Note on the Number of Edges Guaranteeing a $C_4$ in Eulerian Bipartite Digraphs

Let $G$ be an Eulerian bipartite digraph with vertex partition sizes $m,n$. We prove the following Turán-type result: If $e(G) > 2mn/3$ then $G$ contains a directed cycle of length at most 4. The result is sharp. We also show that if $e(G)=2mn/3$ and no directed cycle of length at most 4 exists, then $G$ must be biregular. We apply this result in order to obtain an improved upper bound for the diameter of interchange graphs.