Rainbow spanning structures in strongly edge-colored graphs

Abstract

An edge-colored graph is a graph in which each edge is assigned a color. Such a graph is called strongly edge-colored if each color class forms an induced matching, and called rainbow if all edges receive pairwise distinct colors. In this paper, by establishing a connection with $\mu n$-bounded graphs, we prove that for all sufficiently large integers $n$, every strongly edge-colored graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with minimum degree at least $\frac{n+1}{2}$ contains a rainbow Hamilton cycle. We also characterize all strongly edge-colored graphs on $n$ vertices with minimum degree exactly $\frac{n}{2}$ that do not contain a rainbow Hamilton cycle. As an application, we determine the optimal minimum degree conditions for the existence of rainbow Hamilton paths and rainbow perfect matchings in strongly edge-colored graphs. Together, these results verify three conjectures concerning strongly edge-colored graphs for sufficiently large $n$.