Rainbow cycles for families of matchings
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Given a graph G and a coloring of its edges, a subgraph of G is called rainbow if its edges have distinct colors. The rainbow girth of an edge coloring of G is the minimum length of a rainbow cycle in G. A generalization of the famous Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture (CHC), proposed by the first author, is that if G has n vertices, G is n-edge-colored and the size of every color class is k, then the rainbow girth is at most ⌈n/k ⌉. In the only known example showing sharpness of this conjecture, that stems from an example for the sharpness of CHC, the color classes are stars. This suggests that in the antipodal case to stars, namely matchings, the result can be improved. Indeed, we show that the rainbow girth of n matchings of size at least 2 is O(logn), as compared with the general bound of ⌈n/2 ⌉.
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