Short rainbow cycles in edge-colored graphs

Xiaozheng Chen, Shanshan Guo, Fei Huang

Published 2023-11-21Version 1

A famous conjecture of Caccetta and H\"{a}ggkvist (CHC) states that a directed graph $D$ with $n$ vertices and minimum outdegree at least $r$ has a directed cycle of length at most $\lceil \frac{n}{r}\rceil$. In 2017, Aharoni proposed the following generalization: an edge-colored graph $G$ with $n$ vertices, $n$ color classes of size at least $r$ has a rainbow cycle of length at most $\lceil \frac{n}{r}\rceil$. Since CHC can be seen as the case of Aharoni's Conjecture: color classes in the color partition are monochromatic stars centered at distinct vertices, one way to study Aharoni's Conjecture is to structure the color classes as each color class is either a star, a triangle or contains a matching of size 2. Guo improved the upper bound in Aharoni's Conjecture to $O(\log n)$ in some mixed cases when the color classes are not necessarily stars. In this paper, we extend Guo's results. Our main result is as follows: Let $G$ an edge-colored graph on $n$ vertices and $n$ color classes, if at least $\alpha n$ color classes are either a matching of size 2 or a triangle for $\alpha >\frac{1}{2}$, then $G$ contains a rainbow cycle of length $O(\log n)$. We also prove that the $\log n$ bound is the right order of magnitude.