Rainbow triangles in edge-colored complete graphs

TL;DR

This paper generalizes and sharpens existing results on the existence and quantity of rainbow triangles in edge-colored complete graphs, establishing new minimum color-degree conditions for such structures.

Contribution

It extends previous theorems by providing broader minimum color-degree bounds that guarantee rainbow triangles and multiple disjoint rainbow triangles in complete graphs.

Findings

Every vertex in a complete graph with minimum color-degree at least (n+k)/2 is in at least k rainbow triangles.

Complete graphs with minimum color-degree at least n/2 contain a rainbow triangle, and this bound is optimal.

For n ≥ 7, such graphs contain two vertex-disjoint rainbow triangles, improving previous bounds.

Abstract

Let $G$ be a graph of order $n$ with an edge-coloring $c$, and let $\delta^c(G)$ denote the minimum color-degree of $G$. A subgraph $F$ of $G$ is called rainbow if any two edges of $F$ have distinct colors. There have been a lot results in the existing literature on rainbow triangles in edge-colored complete graphs. Fujita and Magnant showed that for an edge-colored complete graph $G$ of order $n$, if $\delta^c(G)\geq \frac{n+1}{2}$, then every vertex of $G$ is contained in a rainbow triangle. In this paper, we show that if $\delta^c(G)\geq \frac{n+k}{2}$, then every vertex of $G$ is contained in at least $k$ rainbow triangles, which can be seen as a generalization of their result. Li showed that for an edge-colored graph $G$ of order $n$, if $\delta^c(G)\geq \frac{n+1}{2}$, then $G$ contains a rainbow triangle. We show that if $G$ is complete and $\delta^c(G)\geq \frac{n}{2}$, then $G$ contains a rainbow triangle and the bound is sharp. Hu et al. showed that for an edge-colored graph $G$ of order $n\geq 20$, if $\delta^c(G)\geq \frac{n+2}{2}$, then $G$ contains two vertex-disjoint rainbow triangles. We show that if $G$ is complete with order $n\geq 8$ and $\delta^c(G)\geq \frac{n+1}{2}$, then $G$ contains two vertex-disjoint rainbow triangles. Moreover, we improve the result of Hu et al. from $n\geq 20$ to $n\geq 7$, the best possible.