On 5‐Cycles and 6‐Cycles in Regular n‐Tournaments

Abstract

AbstractLet T be a tournament of order n and be the number of cycles of length m in T. For and odd n, the maximum of is achieved for any regular tournament of order n (M. G. Kendall and B. Babington Smith, 1940), and in the case it is attained only for the unique regular locally transitive tournament RLTn of order n (U. Colombo, 1964). A lower bound was also obtained for in the class of regular tournaments of order n (A. Kotzig, 1968). This bound is attained if and only if T is doubly regular (when ) or nearly doubly regular (when ) (B. Alspach and C. Tabib, 1982). In the present article, we show that for any regular tournament T of order n, the equality holds. This allows us to reduce the case to the case In turn, the pure spectral expression for obtained in the class implies that for a regular tournament T of order the inequality holds, with equality if and only if T is doubly regular or T is the unique regular tournament of order 7 that is neither doubly regular nor locally transitive. We also determine the value of c6(RLTn) and conjecture that this value coincides with the minimum number of 6‐cycles in the class for each odd