Colour-biased Hamilton cycles in randomly perturbed graphs

Abstract: Given a graph $G$ and an $r$-edge-colouring $\chi$ on $E(G)$, a Hamilton cycle $H\subset G$ is said to have $t$ colour-bias if $H$ contains $n/r+t$ edges of the same colour in $\chi$. Freschi, Hyde, Lada and Treglown showed every $r$-coloured graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with $\delta(G)\geq(r+1)n/2r+t$ contains a Hamilton cycle $H$ with $\Omega(t)$ colour-bias, generalizing a result of Balogh, Csaba, Jing and Pluh\'{a}r. In 2022, Gishboliner, Krivelevich and Michaeli proved that the random graph $G(n,m)$ with $m\geq(1/2+\varepsilon)n\log n$ typically admits an $\Omega(n)$ colour biased Hamilton cycle in any $r$-colouring. In this paper, we investigate colour-biased Hamilton cycles in randomly perturbed graphs. We show that for every $\alpha>0$, adding $m=O(n)$ random edges to a graph $G_\alpha$ with $\delta(G_\alpha)\geq \alpha n$ typically ensures a Hamilton cycle with $\Omega(n)$ colour bias in any $r$-colouring of $G_\alpha\cup G(n,m)$. Conversely, for certain $G_{\alpha}$, reducing the number of random edges to $m=o(n)$ may eliminate all colour biased Hamilton cycles of $G(n,m)\cup G$ in a certain colouring. In contrast, at the critical endpoint $\alpha=(r+1)/2r$, adding $m$ random edges typically results in a Hamilton cycle with $\Omega(m)$ colour-bias for any $1\ll m\leq n$.