Almost all optimally coloured complete graphs contain a rainbow Hamilton path

Abstract

A subgraph $H$ of an edge-coloured graph is called rainbow if all of the edges of $H$ have different colours. In 1989, Andersen conjectured that every proper edge-colouring of $K_{n}$ admits a rainbow path of length $n-2$. We show that almost all optimal edge-colourings of $K_{n}$ admit both (i) a rainbow Hamilton path and (ii) a rainbow cycle using all of the colours. This result demonstrates that Andersen's Conjecture holds for almost all optimal edge-colourings of $K_{n}$ and answers a recent question of Ferber, Jain, and Sudakov. Our result also has applications to the existence of transversals in random symmetric Latin squares.