Decompositions into spanning rainbow structures

Abstract

A subgraph of an edge-coloured graph is called rainbow if all its edges have distinct colours. The study of rainbow subgraphs goes back more than two hundred years to the work of Euler on Latin squares and has been the focus of extensive research ever since. Euler posed a problem equivalent to finding properly $n$-edge-coloured complete bipartite graphs $K_{n,n}$ which can be decomposed into rainbow perfect matchings. While there are proper edge-colourings of $K_{n,n}$ without even a single rainbow perfect matching, the theme of this paper is to show that with some very weak additional constraints one can find many disjoint rainbow perfect matchings. In particular, we prove that if some fraction of the colour classes have at most $(1-o(1)) n$ edges then one can nearly-decompose the edges of $K_{n,n}$ into edge-disjoint perfect rainbow matchings. As an application of this, we establish in a very strong form a conjecture of Akbari and Alipour and asymptotically prove a conjecture of Barat and Nagy. Both these conjectures concern rainbow perfect matchings in edge-colourings of $K_{n,n}$ with quadratically many colours. Using our techniques, we also prove a number of results on near-decompositions of graphs into other rainbow structures like Hamiltonian cycles and spanning trees. Most notably, we prove that any properly coloured complete graph can be nearly-decomposed into spanning rainbow trees. This asymptotically proves the Brualdi-Hollingsworth and Kaneko-Kano-Suzuki conjectures which predict that a perfect decomposition should exist under the same assumptions.