No Arabic abstract
A chordless cycle, or equivalently a hole, in a graph $G$ is an induced subgraph of $G$ which is a cycle of length at least $4$. We prove that the ErdH{o}s-Posa property holds for chordless cycles, which resolves the major open question concerning the ErdH{o}s-Posa property. Our proof for chordless cycles is constructive: in polynomial time, one can find either $k+1$ vertex-disjoint chordless cycles, or $c_1k^2 log k+c_2$ vertices hitting every chordless cycle for some constants $c_1$ and $c_2$. It immediately implies an approximation algorithm of factor $mathcal{O}(sf{opt}log {sf opt})$ for Chordal Vertex Deletion. We complement our main result by showing that chordless cycles of length at least $ell$ for any fixed $ellge 5$ do not have the ErdH{o}s-Posa property.
We prove that there exists a function $f:mathbb{N}rightarrow mathbb{R}$ such that every digraph $G$ contains either $k$ directed odd cycles where every vertex of $G$ is contained in at most two of them, or a vertex set $X$ of size at most $f(k)$ hitting all directed odd cycles. This extends the half-integral ErdH{o}s-Posa property of undirected odd cycles, proved by Reed [Mangoes and blueberries. Combinatorica 1999], to digraphs.
Robertson and Seymour proved that the family of all graphs containing a fixed graph $H$ as a minor has the ErdH{o}s-Posa property if and only if $H$ is planar. We show that this is no longer true for the edge version of the ErdH{o}s-Posa property, and indeed even fails when $H$ is an arbitrary subcubic tree of large pathwidth or a long ladder. This answers a question of Raymond, Sau and Thilikos.
We prove that there exists a function $f(k)=mathcal{O}(k^2 log k)$ such that for every $C_4$-free graph $G$ and every $k in mathbb{N}$, $G$ either contains $k$ vertex-disjoint holes of length at least $6$, or a set $X$ of at most $f(k)$ vertices such that $G-X$ has no hole of length at least $6$. This answers a question of Kim and Kwon [ErdH{o}s-Posa property of chordless cycles and its applications. JCTB 2020].
A Group Labeled Graph is a pair $(G,Lambda)$ where $G$ is an oriented graph and $Lambda$ is a mapping from the arcs of $G$ to elements of a group. A (not necessarily directed) cycle $C$ is called non-null if for any cyclic ordering of the arcs in $C$, the group element obtained by `adding the labels on forward arcs and `subtracting the labels on reverse arcs is not the identity element of the group. Non-null cycles in group labeled graphs generalize several well-known graph structures, including odd cycles. In this paper, we prove that non-null cycles on Group Labeled Graphs have the half-integral Erdos-Posa property. That is, there is a function $f:{mathbb N}to {mathbb N}$ such that for any $kin {mathbb N}$, any group labeled graph $(G,Lambda)$ has a set of $k$ non-null cycles such that each vertex of $G$ appears in at most two of these cycles or there is a set of at most $f(k)$ vertices that intersects every non-null cycle. Since it is known that non-null cycles do not have the integeral Erdos-Posa property in general, a half-integral Erdos-Posa result is the best one could hope for.
For positive integers $n>dgeq k$, let $phi(n,d,k)$ denote the least integer $phi$ such that every $n$-vertex graph with at least $phi$ vertices of degree at least $d$ contains a path on $k+1$ vertices. Many years ago, ErdH{o}s, Faudree, Schelp and Simonovits proposed the study of the function $phi(n,d,k)$, and conjectured that for any positive integers $n>dgeq k$, it holds that $phi(n,d,k)leq lfloorfrac{k-1}{2}rfloorlfloorfrac{n}{d+1}rfloor+epsilon$, where $epsilon=1$ if $k$ is odd and $epsilon=2$ otherwise. In this paper we determine the value of the function $phi(n,d,k)$ exactly. This confirms the above conjecture of ErdH{o}s et al. for all positive integers $k eq 4$ and in a corrected form for the case $k=4$. Our proof utilizes, among others, a lemma of ErdH{o}s et al., a theorem of Jackson, and a (slight) extension of a very recent theorem of Kostochka, Luo and Zirlin, where the latter two results concern maximum cycles in bipartite graphs. Besides, we construct examples to provide answers to two closely related questions raised by ErdH{o}s et al.