Decomposing highly edge-connected graphs into paths of any given length

Abstract

In 2006, Bar\'at and Thomassen posed the following conjecture: for each tree $T$, there exists a natural number $k_T$ such that, if $G$ is a $k_T$-edge-connected graph and $|E(G)|$ is divisible by $|E(T)|$, then $G$ admits a decomposition into copies of $T$. This conjecture was verified for stars, some bistars, paths of length $3$, $5$, and $2^r$ for every positive integer $r$. We prove that this conjecture holds for paths of any fixed length.