Smallest number of vertices in a 2-arc-strong digraph without good pairs

Branchings play an important role in digraph theory and algorithms. In particular, a chapter in the monograph of Bang-Jensen and Gutin, Digraphs: Theory, Algorithms and Application, Ed. 2, 2009 is wholly devoted to branchings. The well-known Edmonds Branching Theorem provides a characterization for the existence of k arc-disjoint out-branchings rooted at the same vertex. A short proof of the theorem by Lovasz (1976) leads to a polynomial-time algorithm for finding such out-branchings. A natural related problem is to characterize digraphs having an out-branching and an in-branching which are arc-disjoint. Such a pair of branchings is called a good pair.Bang-Jensen, Bessy, Havet and Yeo (2022) pointed out that it is NP-complete to decide if a given digraph has a good pair. They also showed that every digraph of independence number at most 2 and arc-connectivity at least 2 has a good pair, which settled a conjecture of Thomassen for digraphs of independence number 2. Then they asked for the smallest number nngp of vertices in a 2-arc-strong digraph which has no good pair. They proved that 7 < nngp < 10. In this paper, we prove that nn gp = 10, which solves the open problem.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.