Results on the Small Quasi-Kernel Conjecture

TL;DR

This paper proves the Erdős-Szekely conjecture for a class of anti-claw-free digraphs and establishes a sharp upper bound on the size of quasi-kernels in sink-free one-way split digraphs.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to confirm the conjecture for generalized anti-claw-free digraphs and provides a tight bound for quasi-kernels in sink-free one-way split digraphs.

Findings

Erdős-Szekely conjecture holds for anti-claw-free digraphs.

For sink-free one-way split digraphs, a quasi-kernel of size at most (n+3)/2 - sqrt(n) exists.

The bound on quasi-kernel size is proven to be sharp.

Abstract

A {\em quasi-kernel} of a digraph $D$ is an independent set $Q\subseteq V(D)$ such that for every vertex $v\in V(D)\backslash Q$, there exists a directed path with one or two arcs from $v$ to a vertex $u\in Q$. In 1974, Chv\'{a}tal and Lov\'{a}sz proved that every digraph has a quasi-kernel. In 1976, Erd\H{o}s and S\'zekely conjectured that every sink-free digraph $D=(V(D),A(D))$ has a quasi-kernel of size at most $|V(D)|/2$. In this paper, we give a new method to show that the conjecture holds for a generalization of anti-claw-free digraphs. For any sink-free one-way split digraph $D$ of order $n$, when $n\geq 3$, we show a stronger result that $D$ has a quasi-kernel of size at most $\frac{n+3}{2} - \sqrt{n}$, and the bound is sharp.