Vertex-disjoint subtournaments of prescribed minimum outdegree or minimum semidegree: proof for tournaments of a conjecture of Stiebitz (Q666527)

Summary: It was proved \textit{S. Bessy}, \textit{N. Lichiardopol} and \textit{J.-S. Sereni} [``Two proofs of the Bermond-Thomassen conjecture for tournaments with bounded minimum in-degree'', Discrete Math. 310, No. 3, 557--560 (2010; Zbl 1188.05072)] that for \(r \geq 1\), a tournament with minimum semidegree at least \(2r - 1\) contains at least \(r\) vertex-disjoint directed triangles. It was also proved \textit{N. Lichiardopol} [Discrete Math. 310, No. 19, 2567--2570 (2010; Zbl 1227.05157)] that for integers \(q \geq 3\) and \(r \geq 1\), every tournament with minimum semidegree at least \((q - 1)r - 1\) contains at least \(r\) vertex-disjoint directed cycles of length \(q\). None information was given on these directed cycles. In this paper, we fill this gap a little. Namely, we prove that for \(d \geq 1\) and \(r \geq 1\), every tournament of minimum outdegree at least \(((d^2 + 3d + 2)/2)r - (d^2 + d + 2)/2\) contains at least \(r\) vertex-disjoint strongly connected subtournaments of minimum outdegree \(d\). Next, we prove for tournaments a conjecture of Stiebitz stating that for integers \(s \geq 1\) and \(t \geq 1\), there exists a least number \(f(s, t)\) such that every digraph with minimum outdegree at least \(f(s, t)\) can be vertex-partitioned into two sets inducing subdigraphs with minimum outdegree at least \(s\) and at least \(t\), respectively. Similar results related to the semidegree will be given. All these results are consequences of two results concerning the maximum order of a tournament of minimum outdegree \(d\) (of minimum semidegree \(d\)) not containing proper subtournaments of minimum outdegree \(d\) (of minimum semidegree \(d\)).