Packing 4-Cycles in Eulerian and Bipartite Eulerian Tournaments with an Application to Distances in Interchange Graphs

We prove that every Eulerian orientation of K_m,n contains arc-disjoint directed 4-cycles, improving earlier lower bounds. Combined with a probabilistic argument, this result is used to prove that every regular tournament with n vertices contains arc-disjoint directed 4-cycles. The result is also used to provide an upper bound for the distance between two antipodal vertices in interchange graphs.Received February 6, 2004