Partitioning edge-coloured hypergraphs into few monochromatic tight cycles

Abstract

Confirming a conjecture of Gy\'arf\'as, we prove that, for all natural numbers $k$ and $r$, the vertices of every $r$-edge-coloured complete $k$-uniform hypergraph can be partitioned into a bounded number (independent of the size of the hypergraph) of monochromatic tight cycles. We further prove that, for for all natural numbers $p$ and $r$, the vertices of every $r$-edge-coloured complete graph can be partitioned into a bounded number of $p$-th powers of cycles, settling a problem of Elekes, Soukup, Soukup and Szentmikl\'ossy. In fact we prove a common generalisation of both theorems which further extends these results to all host hypergraphs of bounded independence number.