Decompositions of highly connected graphs into paths of length five

Abstract

We study the Decomposition Conjecture posed by Barát and Thomassen (2006), which states that for every tree $T$ there exists a natural number $k_T$ such that, if $G$ is a $k_T$-edge-connected graph and $|E(T)|$ divides $|E(G)|$, then $G$ admits a decomposition into copies of $T$. In a series of papers, Thomassen verified this conjecture for stars, some bistars, paths of length $3$, and paths whose length is a power of $2$. We verify the Decomposition Conjecture for paths of length $5$.