Extending regular edge-colorings of complete hypergraphs

A coloring (partition) of the collection $(\genfrac{}{}{0.0pt}{}{X}{h})$ of all $h$-subsets of a set $X$ is $r$-regular if the number of times each element of $X$ appears in each color class (all sets of the same color) is the same number $r$. We are interested in finding the conditions under which a given $r$-regular coloring of $(\genfrac{}{}{0.0pt}{}{X}{h})$ is extendible to an $s$-regular coloring of $(\genfrac{}{}{0.0pt}{}{Y}{h})$ for $s⩾r$ and $Y⊋X$. The case $\text{◂,▸}h=2,r=s=1$ was solved by Cruse, and due to its connection to completing partial symmetric latin squares, many related problems are extensively studied in the literature, but very little is known for $h⩾3$. The case $r=s=1$ was solved by Häggkvist and Hellgren, settling a conjecture of Brouwer and Baranyai. The cases $h=2$ and $h=3$ were solved by Rodger and Wantland, and Bahmanian and Newman, respectively. In this paper, we completely settle the cases $h=4,\text{◂⩾▸}|Y|⩾4|X|$ and $h=5,\text{◂⩾▸}|Y|⩾5|X|$.     

Graph-like compacta: Characterizations and Eulerian loops

A compact graph-like space is a triple $\left(X,V,E\right)$, where $X$ is a compact, metrizable space, $V\subseteq X$ is a closed zero-dimensional subset, and $E$ is an index set such that $X⧹V\cong \text{◂+▸}E\times \left(0,1\right)$. New characterizations of compact graph-like spaces are given, connecting them to certain classes of continua, and to standard subspaces of Freudenthal compactifications of locally finite graphs. These are applied to characterize Eulerian graph-like compacta.     

The optimal general upper bound for the distinguishing index of infinite graphs

The distinguishing index $D\prime \left(G\right)$ of a graph $G$ is the least cardinal number $d$ such that $G$ has an edge-coloring with $d$ colors, which is preserved only by the trivial automorphism. We prove a general upper bound $D\prime \text{◂≤▸}\left(G\right)\le \mathrm{\Delta }-1$ for any connected infinite graph $G$ with finite maximum degree $\mathrm{\Delta }\ge 3$. This is in contrast with finite graphs since for every $\mathrm{\Delta }\ge 3$ there exist infinitely many connected, finite graphs $G$ with $\text{◂,▸}D\prime \left(G\right)=\mathrm{\Delta }$. We also give examples showing that this bound is sharp for any maximum degree $\mathrm{\Delta }$.