Rainbow trees in uniformly edge-coloured graphs

TL;DR

This paper establishes conditions under which uniformly edge-coloured random and perturbed graphs contain rainbow spanning and almost-spanning trees with bounded degree, extending classical embedding results to rainbow variants.

Contribution

It introduces new probabilistic thresholds for rainbow spanning trees in random and perturbed graphs, generalizing classical embedding theorems to rainbow settings.

Findings

Rainbow almost-spanning trees exist in G(n, C/n) with high probability.

Rainbow spanning trees are present in perturbed graphs with slightly more than n colours.

A rainbow spanning tree exists with n-1 colours in the union of a fixed graph and a random graph.

Abstract

We obtain sufficient conditions for the emergence of spanning and almost-spanning bounded-degree {\sl rainbow} trees in various host graphs, having their edges coloured independently and uniformly at random, using a predetermined palette. Our first result asserts that a uniform colouring of $\mathbb{G}(n,\omega(1)/n)$, using a palette of size $n$, a.a.s. admits a rainbow copy of any given bounded-degree tree on at most $(1-\varepsilon)n$ vertices, where $\varepsilon > 0$ is arbitrarily small yet fixed. This serves as a rainbow variant of a classical result by Alon, Krivelevich, and Sudakov pertaining to the embedding of bounded-degree almost-spanning prescribed trees in $\mathbb{G}(n,C/n)$, where $C > 0$ is independent of $n$. Given an $n$-vertex graph $G$ with minimum degree at least $\delta n$, where $\delta > 0$ is fixed, we use our aforementioned result in order to prove that a uniform colouring of the randomly perturbed graph $G \cup \mathbb{G}(n,\omega(1)/n)$, using $(1+\alpha)n$ colours, where $\alpha > 0$ is arbitrarily small yet fixed, a.a.s. admits a rainbow copy of any given bounded-degree {\sl spanning} tree. This can be viewed as a rainbow variant of a result by Krivelevich, Kwan, and Sudakov who proved that $G \cup \mathbb{G}(n,C/n)$, where $C > 0$ is independent of $n$, a.a.s. admits a copy of any given bounded-degree spanning tree. Finally, and with $G$ as above, we prove that a uniform colouring of $G \cup \mathbb{G}(n,\omega(n^{-2}))$ using $n-1$ colours a.a.s. admits a rainbow spanning tree. Put another way, the trivial lower bound on the size of the palette required for supporting a rainbow spanning tree is also sufficient, essentially as soon as the random perturbation a.a.s. has edges.