Abstract

Abstract. The Directed Maximum Leaf Out-Branching problem is to find an out-branching (i.e. a rooted oriented spanning tree) in a given digraph with the maximum number of leaves. In this paper, we obtain two combinatorial results on the number of leaves in out-branchings. We show that – every strongly connected n-vertex digraph D with minimum indegree at least 3 has an out-branching with at least (n/4) 1/3 − 1 leaves; – if a strongly connected digraph D does not contain an out-branching with k leaves, then the pathwidth of its underlying graph UG(D) is O(k log k). Moreover, if the digraph is acyclic, the pathwidth is at most 4k. The last result implies that it can be decided in time 2 O(k log2 k) · n O(1) whether a strongly connected digraph on n vertices has an out-branching with at least k leaves. On acyclic digraphs the running time of our algorithm is 2 O(k log k) · n O(1). 1

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