Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2012
A detachment of a hypergraph is formed by splitting each vertex into one or more subvertices, and sharing the incident edges arbitrarily among the subvertices. For a given edge-coloured hypergraph , we prove that there exists a detachment
such that the degree of each vertex and the multiplicity of each edge in
(and each colour class of
) are shared fairly among the subvertices in
(and each colour class of
, respectively).
Let be a hypergraph with vertex partition {V1,. . .,Vn}, |Vi| = pi for 1 ≤ i ≤ n such that there are λi edges of size hi incident with every hi vertices, at most one vertex from each part for 1 ≤ i ≤ m (so no edge is incident with more than one vertex of a part). We use our detachment theorem to show that the obvious necessary conditions for
to be expressed as the union
1 ∪ ··· ∪
k of k edge-disjoint factors, where for 1 ≤ i ≤ k,
i is ri-regular, are also sufficient. Baranyai solved the case of h1 = ··· = hm, λ1 = ··· = λm = 1, p1 = ··· = pm, r1 = ··· = rk. Berge and Johnson (and later Brouwer and Tijdeman, respectively) considered (and solved, respectively) the case of hi = i, 1 ≤ i ≤ m, p1 = ··· = pm = λ1 = ··· = λm = r1 = ··· = rk = 1. We also extend our result to the case where each
i is almost regular.