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A Short Proof of the Blow-Up Lemma for Approximate Decompositions

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Abstract

Kim, Kühn, Osthus and Tyomkyn (Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 371 (2019), 4655–4742) greatly extended the well-known blow-up lemma of Komlós, Sárközy and Szemerédi by proving a ‘blow-up lemma for approximate decompositions’ which states that multipartite quasirandom graphs can be almost decomposed into any collection of bounded degree graphs with the same multipartite structure and slightly fewer edges. This result has already been used by Joos, Kim, Kühn and Osthus to prove the tree packing conjecture due to Gyárfás and Lehel from 1976 and Ringel’s conjecture from 1963 for bounded degree trees as well as implicitly in the recent resolution of the Oberwolfach problem (asked by Ringel in 1967) by Glock, Joos, Kim, Kühn and Osthus.

Here we present a new and significantly shorter proof of the blow-up lemma for approximate decompositions. In fact, we prove a more general theorem that yields packings with stronger quasirandom properties which is useful for potential applications.

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Acknowledgement

We thank the referees for useful comments on our manuscript and the second author thanks Jaehoon Kim for stimulating discussions at early stages of the project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Optimierung und Operations Research, Universität Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    Stefan Ehard

  2. Institut für Informatik, Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

    Felix Joos

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  1. Stefan Ehard
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  2. Felix Joos
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Correspondence to Felix Joos.

Additional information

The research leading to these results was partially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - 339933727 (F. Joos).

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Ehard, S., Joos, F. A Short Proof of the Blow-Up Lemma for Approximate Decompositions. Combinatorica 42, 771–819 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00493-020-4640-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00493-020-4640-9

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