Abstract

Lehel conjectured in the 1970s that the vertices of every red and blue edge-coloured complete graph can be partitioned into two monochromatic cycles. This was confirmed in 2010 by Bessy and Thomassé. However, the host graph G does not have to be complete. It suffices to require that G has minimum degree at least 3n/4, where n is the order of G, as was shown recently by Letzter, confirming a conjecture of Balogh, Barát, Gerbner, Gyárfás and Sárközy. This degree condition is tight. Here we continue this line of research, by proving that for every red and blue edge-colouring of an n-vertex graph of minimum degree at least 2n/3+o(n), there is a partition of the vertex set into three monochromatic cycles. This approximately verifies a conjecture of Pokrovskiy and is essentially tight.