Packing cycles in complete graphs

We introduce a new technique for packing pairwise edge-disjoint cycles of specified lengths in complete graphs and use it to prove several results. Firstly, we prove the existence of dense packings of the complete graph with pairwise edge-disjoint cycles of arbitrary specified lengths. We then use this result to prove the existence of decompositions of the complete graph of odd order into pairwise edge-disjoint cycles for a large family of lists of specified cycle lengths. Finally, we construct new maximum packings of the complete graph with pairwise edge-disjoint cycles of uniform length. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.