Linearly many rainbow trees in properly edge-coloured complete graphs

Abstract

A subgraph of an edge-coloured complete graph is called rainbow if all its edges have different colours. The study of rainbow decompositions has a long history, going back to the work of Euler on Latin squares. In this paper we discuss three problems about decomposing complete graphs into rainbow trees: the Brualdi-Hollingsworth Conjecture, Constantine's Conjecture, and the Kaneko-Kano-Suzuki Conjecture. We show that in every proper edge-colouring of $K_n$ there are $10^{-6}n$ edge-disjoint spanning isomorphic rainbow trees. This simultaneously improves the best known bounds on all these conjectures. Using our method we also show that every properly $(n-1)$-edge-coloured $K_n$ has $n/9$ edge-disjoint rainbow trees, giving further improvement on the Brualdi-Hollingsworth Conjecture.