A note on Gupta's co-density conjecture

Abstract

Let $G$ be a multigraph. A subset $F$ of $E(G)$ is an edge cover of $G$ if every vertex of $G$ is incident to an edge of $F$. The cover index, $ξ(G)$, is the largest number of edge covers into which the edges of $G$ can be partitioned. Clearly $ξ(G) \le δ(G)$, the minimum degree of $G$. For $U\subseteq V(G)$, denote by $E^+(U)$ the set of edges incident to a vertex of $U$. When $|U|$ is odd, to cover all the vertices of $U$, any edge cover needs to contain at least $(|U|+1)/2$ edges from $E^+(U)$, indicating $ ξ(G) \le |E^+(U)|/ (|U|+1)/2$. Let $ρ_c(G)$, the co-density of $G$, be defined as the minimum of $|E^+(U)|/((|U|+1)/2)$ ranging over all $U\subseteq V(G)$ with $|U| $ odd and at least 3. Then $ρ_c(G)$ provides another upper bound on $ξ(G)$. Thus $ξ(G) \le \min\{δ(G), \lfloor ρ_c(G) \rfloor \}$. For a lower bound on $ξ(G)$, in 1967, Gupta conjectured that $ξ(G) \ge \min\{δ(G)-1, \lfloor ρ_c(G) \rfloor \}$. Gupta showed that the conjecture is true when $G$ is simple, and Cao et al. verified this conjecture when $ρ_c(G)$ is not an integer. In this note, we confirm the conjecture when the maximum multiplicity of $G$ is at most two or $ \min\{δ(G)-1, \lfloor ρ_c(G) \rfloor \} \le 6$.