An approximate version of Jackson’s conjecture

Abstract A diregular bipartite tournament is a balanced complete bipartite graph whose edges are oriented so that every vertex has the same in- and out-degree. In 1981 Jackson showed that a diregular bipartite tournament contains a Hamilton cycle, and conjectured that in fact its edge set can be partitioned into Hamilton cycles. We prove an approximate version of this conjecture: for every ε > 0 there exists n0 such that every diregular bipartite tournament on 2n ≥ n0 vertices contains a collection of (1/2–ε)n cycles of length at least (2–ε)n. Increasing the degree by a small proportion allows us to prove the existence of many Hamilton cycles: for every c > 1/2 and ε > 0 there exists n0 such that every cn-regular bipartite digraph on 2n ≥ n0 vertices contains (1−ε)cn edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles.