Star-Forest Decompositions of Complete Graphs

Abstract

We deal with the problem of decomposing a complete geometric graph into plane star-forests. In particular, we disprove a recent conjecture by Pach, Saghafian and Schnider by constructing for each $n$ a complete geometric graph on $n$ vertices which can be decomposed into $\frac{n}{2}+1$ plane star-forests. Additionally we prove that for even $n$, every decomposition of complete abstract graph on $n$ vertices into $\frac{n}{2}+1$ star-forests is composed of a perfect matching and $\frac{n}{2}$ star-forests with two edge-balanced components, which we call broken double stars.