Packing Loose Hamilton Cycles

Abstract

A subsetCof edges in ak-uniform hypergraphHis aloose Hamilton cycleifCcovers all the vertices ofHand there exists a cyclic ordering of these vertices such that the edges inCare segments of that order and such that every two consecutive edges share exactly one vertex. The binomial randomk-uniform hypergraphHkn,phas vertex set [n] and an edge setEobtained by adding eachk-tuplee∈ ($\binom{[n]}{k}$) toEwith probabilityp, independently at random.Here we consider the problem of finding edge-disjoint loose Hamilton cycles covering all buto(|E|) edges, referred to as thepacking problem. While it is known that the threshold probability of the appearance of a loose Hamilton cycle inHkn,pis$p=\Theta\biggl(\frac{\log n}{n^{k-1}}\biggr),$the best known bounds for the packing problem are aroundp= polylog(n)/n. Here we make substantial progress and prove the following asymptotically (up to a polylog(n) factor) best possible result: forp≥ logCn/nk−1, a randomk-uniform hypergraphHkn,pwith high probability contains$N:=(1-o(1))\frac{\binom{n}{k}p}{n/(k-1)}$edge-disjoint loose Hamilton cycles.Our proof utilizes and modifies the idea of ‘online sprinkling’ recently introduced by Vu and the first author.