Short cycles in digraphs and the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture

In the theory of digraphs, the study of cycles is a subject of great importance and has given birth to a number of deep questions such as the Behzad-Chartrand-Wall conjecture (1970) and its generalization, the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture (1978). Despite a lot of interest and efforts, the progress on these remains slow and mostly restricted to the solution of some special cases. In this note, we prove these conjectures for digraphs with girth is at least as large as their minimum out-degree and without short even cycles. More generally, we prove that if a digraph has sufficiently large girth and does not contain closed walks of certain lengths, then the conjectures hold. The proof makes use of some of the known results on the Caccetta-Häggkvist conjecture, properties of direct products of digraphs and a construction that multiplies the girth of a digraph.

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