Near rainbow Hamilton cycles in dense graphs

Abstract

Finding near-rainbow Hamilton cycles in properly edge-coloured graphs was first studied by Andersen, who proved in 1989 that every proper edge colouring of the complete graph on $n$ vertices contains a Hamilton cycle with at least $n-\sqrt{2n}$ distinct colours. This result was improved to $n-O(\log^2 n)$ by Balogh and Molla in 2019. In this paper, we consider Anderson's problem for general graphs with a given minimum degree. We prove every globally $n/8$-bounded (i.e. every colour is assigned to at most $n/8$ edges) properly edge-coloured graph $G$ with $\delta(G) \geq (1/2+\varepsilon)n$ contains a Hamilton cycle with $n-o(n)$ distinct colours. Moreover, we show that the constant $1/8$ is best possible.