Automorphisms generating disjoint Hamilton cycles in star graphs

In the first part of the thesis we define an automorphism φn for each star graph Stn of degree n − 1, which yields permutations of labels for the edges of Stn taken from the set of integers {1, . . . , bn/2c}. By decomposing these permutations into permutation cycles, we are able to identify edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles that are automorphic images of a known two-labelled Hamilton cycle H1 2(n) in Stn. Our main result is an improvement from the existing lower bound of bϕ(n)/10c to b2ϕ(n)/9c, where ϕ is Euler’s totient function, for the known number of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in Stn for all odd integers n. For prime n, the improvement is from bn/8c to bn/5c. We extend this result to the cases when n is the power of a prime other than 3 and 7. The second part of the thesis studies ‘symmetric’ collections of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in Stn, i.e. collections that comprise images of H1 2(n) under general label-mapping automorphisms. We show that, for all even n, there exists a symmetric collection of bϕ(n)/2c edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, and Stn cannot have symmetric collections of greater than bϕ(n)/2c such cycles for any n. Thus, Stn is not symmetrically Hamilton decomposable if n is not prime. We also give cases of even n, in terms of Carmichael’s reduced totient function λ, for which ‘strongly’ symmetric collections of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles, which are generated from H1 2(n) by a single automorphism, can and cannot attain the optimum bound bϕ(n)/2c for symmetric collections. In particular, we show that if n is a power of 2, then Stn has a spanning subgraph with more than half of the edges of Stn, which is strongly symmetrically Hamilton decomposable. For odd n, it remains an open problem as to whether the bϕ(n)/2c can be achieved for symmetric collections, but we are able to show that, for certain odd n, a ϕ(n)/4 bound is achievable and optimal for strongly symmetric collections. The search for edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in star graphs is important for the design of interconnection network topologies in computer science. All our results improve on the known bounds for numbers of any kind of edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles in star graphs.