Decomposing hypergraphs into cycle factors

Abstract

A famous result by Rödl, Ruciński, and Szemerédi guarantees a (tight) Hamilton cycle in $k$-uniform hypergraphs $H$ on $n$ vertices with minimum $(k-1)$-degree $\hat{I}{´}_{k-1}(H)\ge (1/2+o(1))n$, thereby extending Dirac's result from graphs to hypergraphs. For graphs, much more is known; each graph on $n$ vertices with $\hat{I}´(G)\ge (1/2+o(1))n$ contains $(1-o(1))r$ edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles where $r$ is the largest integer such that $G$ contains a spanning $2r$-regular subgraph, which is clearly asymptotically optimal. This was proved by Ferber, Krivelevich, and Sudakov answering a question raised by Kühn, Lapinskas, and Osthus. We extend this result to hypergraphs; every $k$-uniform hypergraph $H$ on $n$ vertices with $\hat{I}{´}_{k-1}(H)\ge (1/2+o(1))n$ contains $(1-o(1))r$ edge-disjoint (tight) Hamilton cycles where $r$ is the largest integer such that $H$ contains a spanning subgraph with each vertex belonging to $kr$ edges. In particular, this yields an asymptotic solution to a question of Glock, Kühn, and Osthus. In fact, our main result applies to approximately vertex-regular $k$-uniform hypergraphs with a weak quasirandom property and provides approximate decompositions into cycle factors without too short cycles.

27 pages