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Yusuke Kobayashi

Publications and source records attributed to Yusuke Kobayashi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Thickness dependence of diode efficiency in superconducting Fe(Se,Te)/FeTe thin-film heterostructure devices

The superconducting diode effect (SDE) is a nonreciprocal transport phenomenon, in which the superconducting critical current density depends on the polarity of the current. It has attracted recent attention because of its potential applications to a rectifier without energy dissipation. While SDE has been observed in a wide range of superconducting materials with broken inversion symmetry as well as thin-film heterostructures, the microscopic origin linking structural inversion asymmetry of electronic band, spin-orbit interaction, and vortex pinning remains to be clarified. In this study, we investigate SDE in Fe(Se,Te)/FeTe heterostructure devices as a function of the superconducting Fe(Se,Te) layer thickness tFST to elucidate the role of structural inversion asymmetry on the vortex-induced SDE. We find that the SDE efficiency monotonically increases with increasing tFST, which can be understood by considering that the band bending in the bulk Fe(Se,Te) layer induces the structural inversion asymmetry and thus, the Rashba spin-orbit interaction. In addition, we demonstrate almost 100% rectification for the Fe(Se,Te)/FeTe heterostructure devices in half- and full-wave oscillation configurations. Our findings point out the importance of structural architecture for realization of highly efficient SDE devices based on superconducting thin-film heterostructures.

cond-mat.supr-con

An Approximation Algorithm for 2-Vertex-Connectivity via Cycle-Restricted 2-Edge-Covers

In the 2-Vertex-Connected Spanning Subgraph problem (2-VCSS), we are given an undirected graph $G$, and the objective is to find a 2-vertex-connected spanning subgraph $S$ of $G$ with the minimum number of edges. In the context of survivable network design, 2-VCSS is one of the most fundamental and well-studied problems. There has been active research on improving the approximation ratio of algorithms, and the current best ratio is $\frac{4}{3}$, achieved by Bosch-Calvo, Grandoni, and Jabal Ameli. In this paper, we improve the approximation ratio to $\frac{21}{16}+\varepsilon$ ($<1.313$). The key idea in our algorithm is to introduce a 2-edge-cover without certain cycle components, and use it as an initial solution.

cs.DS

Polynomial Kernels with Reachability for Weighted $d$-Matroid Intersection

This paper studies randomized polynomial kernelization for the weighted $d$-matroid intersection problem. While the problem is known to have a kernel of size $O(d^{(k - 1)d})$ where $k$ is the solution size, the existence of a polynomial kernel is not known, except for the cases when either all the given matroids are partition matroids~(i.e., the $d$-dimensional matching problem) or all the given matroids are linearly representable. The main contribution of this paper is to develop a new kernelization technique for handling general matroids. We first show that the weighted $d$-matroid intersection problem admits a polynomial kernel when one matroid is arbitrary and the other $d-1$ matroids are partition matroids. Interestingly, the obtained kernel has size $\tilde{O}(k^d)$, which matches the optimal bound~(up to logarithmic factors) for the $d$-dimensional matching problem. This approach can be adapted to the case when $d-1$ matroids in the input belong to a more general class of matroids, including graphic, cographic, and transversal matroids. We also show that the problem has a kernel of pseudo-polynomial size when given $d-1$ matroids are laminar. Our technique finds a kernel such that any feasible solution of a given instance can reach a better solution in the kernel, which is sufficiently versatile to allow us to design parameterized streaming algorithms and faster EPTASs.

cs.DS

A PTAS for Weighted Triangle-free 2-Matching

In the Weighted Triangle-Free 2-Matching problem (WTF2M), we are given an undirected edge-weighted graph. Our goal is to compute a maximum-weight subgraph that is a 2-matching (i.e., no node has degree more than $2$) and triangle-free (i.e., it does not contain any cycle with $3$ edges). One of the main motivations for this and related problems is their practical and theoretical connection with the Traveling Salesperson Problem and with some $2$-connectivity network design problems. WTF2M is not known to be NP-hard and at the same time no polynomial-time algorithm to solve it is known in the general case (polynomial-time algorithms are known only for some special cases). The best-known (folklore) approximation algorithm for this problem simply computes a maximum-weight 2-matching, and then drops the cheapest edge of each triangle: this gives a $2/3$ approximation. In this paper we present a PTAS for WTF2M, i.e., a polynomial-time $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for any given constant $\varepsilon>0$. Our result is based on a simple local-search algorithm and a non-trivial analysis.

cs.DS

A Computer-Assisted Proof of the Optimal Density Bound for Pinwheel Covering

In the covering version of the pinwheel scheduling problem, a daily task must be assigned to agents under the constraint that agent $i$ can perform the task at most once in any $a_i$-day interval. In this paper, we determine the optimal constant $\alpha^* = 1.264\ldots$ such that every instance with $\sum_{i} 1 / a_i \ge \alpha^*$ is schedulable. This resolves an open problem posed by Kawamura and Soejima (2020). Our proof combines Kawamura's (2026) techniques for the packing version with new mathematical insights to reduce the analysis to a finite set of instances, which are then verified through an exhaustive computer-aided search that draws on ideas from G\k{a}sieniec, Smith, and Wild (2022). The same result was obtained independently by Mishra (2026).

cs.DM

Minimum Sum Coloring with Bundles in Trees and Bipartite Graphs

The minimum sum coloring problem with bundles was introduced by Darbouy and Friggstad (SWAT 2024) as a common generalization of the minimum coloring problem and the minimum sum coloring problem. During their presentation, the following open problem was raised: whether the minimum sum coloring problem with bundles could be solved in polynomial time for trees. We answer their question in the negative by proving that the minimum sum coloring problem with bundles is NP-hard even for paths. We complement this hardness by providing algorithms of the following types. First, we provide a fixed-parameter algorithm for trees when the number of bundles is a parameter; this can be extended to graphs of bounded treewidth. Second, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm for trees when bundles form a partition of the vertex set and the difference between the number of vertices and the number of bundles is constant. Third, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm for trees when bundles form a partition of the vertex set and each bundle induces a connected subgraph. We further show that for bipartite graphs, the problem with weights is NP-hard even when the number of bundles is at least three, but is polynomial-time solvable when the number of bundles is at most two. The threshold shifts to three versus four for the problem without weights.

cs.DS

A scaling relation of vortex-induced rectification effects in a superconducting thin-film heterostructure

Supercurrent rectification, nonreciprocal response of superconducting properties sensitive to the polarity of bias and magnetic field, has attracted growing interest as an ideal diode. While the superconducting rectification effect is a consequence of the asymmetric vortex pinning, the mechanisms to develop its asymmetric potentials have been a subject of ongoing debate, mainly focusing on microscopic breaking of spatial inversion symmetry and macroscopic imbalance of the sample structure. Here, we report on comparative study of the superconducting diode effect and nonreciprocal resistance in a superconducting Fe(Se,Te)/FeTe heterostructure. In normal state, we observe finite nonreciprocal resistance as a hallmark of the spin-orbit interaction with structural inversion asymmetry. In the superconducting state, we find that the strongly enhanced nonreciprocal coefficient in transition regime is directly coupled to the superconducting diode efficiency through a universal scaling law, indicating the role of spin-momentum-locked state on the asymmetric pinning potential. Our findings, providing a unified picture of the superconducting rectification, pave the way for functionalizing superconducting diode devices.

cond-mat.supr-con

Loss Minimization for Electrical Flows over Spanning Trees on Grids

We study the electrical distribution network reconfiguration problem, defined as follows. We are given an undirected graph with a root vertex, demand at each non-root vertex, and resistance on each edge. Then, we want to find a spanning tree of the graph that specifies the routing of power from the root to each vertex so that all the demands are satisfied and the energy loss is minimized. This problem is known to be NP-hard in general. When restricted to grids with uniform resistance and the root located at a corner, Gupta, Khodabaksh, Mortagy and Nikolova [Mathematical Programming 2022] invented the so-called Min-Min algorithm whose approximation factor is theoretically guaranteed. Our contributions are twofold. First, we prove that the problem is NP-hard even for grids; this resolves the open problem posed by Gupta et al. Second, we give a refined analysis of the Min-Min algorithm and improve its approximation factor under the same setup. In the analysis, we formulate the problem of giving an upper bound for the approximation factor as a non-linear optimization problem that maximizes a convex function over a polytope, which is less commonly employed in the analysis of approximation algorithms than linear optimization problems.

cs.DS

Validating a PTAS for Triangle-Free 2-Matching via a Simple Decomposition Theorem

A triangle-free (simple) 2-matching is an edge set that has at most $2$ edges incident to each vertex and contains no cycle of length $3$. For the problem of finding a maximum cardinality triangle-free 2-matching in a given graph, a complicated exact algorithm was proposed by Hartvigsen. Recently, a simple PTAS using local search was presented by Bosch-Calvo, Grandoni, and Ameli, but its validity proof is not easy. In this paper, we show a natural and simple decomposition theorem for triangle-free 2-matchings, which leads to a simpler validity proof of the PTAS for the problem.

cs.DS

On the two problems in Ramsey achievement games

Let $p,q$ be two integers with $p\geq q$. Given a finite graph $F$ with no isolated vertices, the generalized Ramsey achievement game of $F$ on the complete graph $K_n$, denoted by $(p,q;K_n,F,+)$, is played by two players called Alice and Bob. In each round, Alice firstly chooses $p$ uncolored edges $e_1,e_2,...,e_p$ and colors it blue, then Bob chooses $q$ uncolored edge $f_1,f_2,...,f_q$ and colors it red; the player who can first complete the formation of $F$ in his (or her) color is the winner. The generalized achievement number of $F$, denoted by ${a}(p,q;F)$ is defined to be the smallest $n$ for which Alice has a winning strategy. If $p=q=1$, then it is denoted by ${a}(F)$, which is the classical achievement number of $F$ introduced by Harary in 1982. If Alice aims to form a blue $F$, and the goal of Bob is to try to stop him, this kind of game is called the first player game by Bollobás. Let ${a}^*(F)$ be the smallest positive integer $n$ for which Alice has a winning strategy in the first player game. A conjecture due to Harary states that the minimum value of ${a}(T)$ is realized when $T$ is a path and the maximum value of ${a}(T)$ is realized when $T$ is a star among all trees $T$ of order $n$. He also asked which graphs $F$ satisfy $a^*(F)=a(F)$? In this paper, we proved that $n\leq {a}(p,q;T)\leq n+q\left\lfloor (n-2)/p \right\rfloor$ for all trees $T$ of order $n$, and obtained a lower bound of ${a}(p,q;K_{1,n-1})$, where $K_{1,n-1}$ is a star. We proved that the minimum value of ${a}(T)$ is realized when $T$ is a path which gives a positive solution to the first part of Harary's conjecture, and ${a}(T)\leq 2n-2$ for all trees of order $n$. We also proved that for $n\geq 3$, we have $2n-2-\sqrt{(4n-8)\ln (4n-4)}\leq a(K_{1,n-1})\leq 2n-2$ with the help of a theorem of Alon, Krivelevich, Spencer and Szabó. We proved that $a^*(P_n)=a(P_n)$ for a path $P_n$.

math.CO

Finding Spanning Trees with Perfect Matchings

We investigate the tractability of a simple fusion of two fundamental structures on graphs, a spanning tree and a perfect matching. Specifically, we consider the following problem: given an edge-weighted graph, find a minimum-weight spanning tree among those containing a perfect matching. On the positive side, we design a simple greedy algorithm for the case when the graph is complete (or complete bipartite) and the edge weights take at most two values. On the negative side, the problem is NP-hard even when the graph is complete (or complete bipartite) and the edge weights take at most three values, or when the graph is cubic, planar, and bipartite and the edge weights take at most two values. We also consider an interesting variant. We call a tree strongly balanced if on one side of the bipartition of the vertex set with respect to the tree, all but one of the vertices have degree $2$ and the remaining one is a leaf. This property is a sufficient condition for a tree to have a perfect matching, which enjoys an additional property. When the underlying graph is bipartite, strongly balanced spanning trees can be written as matroid intersection, and this fact was recently utilized to design an approximation algorithm for some kind of connectivity augmentation problem. The natural question is its tractability in nonbipartite graphs. As a negative answer, it turns out NP-hard to test whether a given graph has a strongly balanced spanning tree or not even when the graph is subcubic and planar.

cs.DS

Subquadratic Submodular Maximization with a General Matroid Constraint

We consider fast algorithms for monotone submodular maximization with a general matroid constraint. We present a randomized $(1 - 1/e - ε)$-approximation algorithm that requires $\tilde{O}_ε(\sqrt{r} n)$ independence oracle and value oracle queries, where $n$ is the number of elements in the matroid and $r \leq n$ is the rank of the matroid. This improves upon the previously best algorithm by Buchbinder-Feldman-Schwartz [Mathematics of Operations Research 2017] that requires $\tilde{O}_ε(r^2 + \sqrt{r}n)$ queries. Our algorithm is based on continuous relaxation, as with other submodular maximization algorithms in the literature. To achieve subquadratic query complexity, we develop a new rounding algorithm, which is our main technical contribution. The rounding algorithm takes as input a point represented as a convex combination of $t$ bases of a matroid and rounds it to an integral solution. Our rounding algorithm requires $\tilde{O}(r^{3/2} t)$ independence oracle queries, while the previously best rounding algorithm by Chekuri-Vondrák-Zenklusen [FOCS 2010] requires $O(r^2 t)$ independence oracle queries. A key idea in our rounding algorithm is to use a directed cycle of arbitrary length in an auxiliary graph, while the algorithm of Chekuri-Vondrák-Zenklusen focused on directed cycles of length two.

cs.DS

Reconfiguration of the Union of Arborescences

An arborescence in a digraph is an acyclic arc subset in which every vertex execpt a root has exactly one incoming arc. In this paper, we reveal the reconfigurability of the union of $k$ arborescences for fixed $k$ in the following sense: for any pair of arc subsets that can be partitioned into $k$ arborescences, one can be transformed into the other by exchanging arcs one by one so that every intermediate arc subset can also be partitioned into $k$ arborescences. This generalizes the result by Ito et al. (2023), who showed the case with $k=1$. Since the union of $k$ arborescences can be represented as a common matroid basis of two matroids, our result gives a new non-trivial example of matroid pairs for which two common bases are always reconfigurable to each other.

cs.DM

Finding a Maximum Restricted $t$-Matching via Boolean Edge-CSP

The problem of finding a maximum $2$-matching without short cycles has received significant attention due to its relevance to the Hamilton cycle problem. This problem is generalized to finding a maximum $t$-matching which excludes specified complete $t$-partite subgraphs, where $t$ is a fixed positive integer. The polynomial solvability of this generalized problem remains an open question. In this paper, we present polynomial-time algorithms for the following two cases of this problem: in the first case the forbidden complete $t$-partite subgraphs are edge-disjoint; and in the second case the maximum degree of the input graph is at most $2t-1$. Our result for the first case extends the previous work of Nam (1994) showing the polynomial solvability of the problem of finding a maximum $2$-matching without cycles of length four, where the cycles of length four are vertex-disjoint. The second result expands upon the works of Bérczi and Végh (2010) and Kobayashi and Yin (2012), which focused on graphs with maximum degree at most $t+1$. Our algorithms are obtained from exploiting the discrete structure of restricted $t$-matchings and employing an algorithm for the Boolean edge-CSP.

math.CO

Reconfiguration of Time-Respecting Arborescences

An arborescence, which is a directed analogue of a spanning tree in an undirected graph, is one of the most fundamental combinatorial objects in a digraph. In this paper, we study arborescences in digraphs from the viewpoint of combinatorial reconfiguration, which is the field where we study reachability between two configurations of some combinatorial objects via some specified operations. Especially, we consider reconfiguration problems for time-respecting arborescences, which were introduced by Kempe, Kleinberg, and Kumar. We first prove that if the roots of the initial and target time-respecting arborescences are the same, then the target arborescence is always reachable from the initial one and we can find a shortest reconfiguration sequence in polynomial time. Furthermore, we show if the roots are not the same, then the target arborescence may not be reachable from the initial one. On the other hand, we show that we can determine whether the target arborescence is reachable form the initial one in polynomial time. Finally, we prove that it is NP-hard to find a shortest reconfiguration sequence in the case where the roots are not the same. Our results show an interesting contrast to the previous results for (ordinary) arborescences reconfiguration problems.

cs.DS

Algorithmic Theory of Qubit Routing

The qubit routing problem, also known as the swap minimization problem, is a (classical) combinatorial optimization problem that arises in the design of compilers of quantum programs. We study the qubit routing problem from the viewpoint of theoretical computer science, while most of the existing studies investigated the practical aspects. We concentrate on the linear nearest neighbor (LNN) architectures of quantum computers, in which the graph topology is a path. Our results are three-fold. (1) We prove that the qubit routing problem is NP-hard. (2) We give a fixed-parameter algorithm when the number of two-qubit gates is a parameter. (3) We give a polynomial-time algorithm when each qubit is involved in at most one two-qubit gate.

cs.DS

EFX Allocations for Indivisible Chores: Matching-Based Approach

One of the most important topics in discrete fair division is whether an EFX allocation exists for any instance. Although the existence of EFX allocations is a standing open problem for both goods and chores, the understanding of the existence of EFX allocations for chores is less established compared to goods. We study the existence of EFX allocation for chores under the assumption that all agent's cost functions are additive. Specifically, we show the existence of EFX allocations for the following three cases: (i) the number of chores is at most twice the number of agents, (ii) the cost functions of all agents except for one are identical ordering, and (iii) the number of agents is three and each agent has a personalized bi-valued cost function. Furthermore, we provide a polynomial time algorithm to find an EFX allocation for each case.

cs.GT

Hardness of Finding Combinatorial Shortest Paths on Graph Associahedra

We prove that the computation of a combinatorial shortest path between two vertices of a graph associahedron, introduced by Carr and Devadoss, is NP-hard. This resolves an open problem raised by Cardinal. A graph associahedron is a generalization of the well-known associahedron. The associahedron is obtained as the graph associahedron of a path. It is a tantalizing and important open problem in theoretical computer science whether the computation of a combinatorial shortest path between two vertices of the associahedron can be done in polynomial time, which is identical to the computation of the flip distance between two triangulations of a convex polygon, and the rotation distance between two rooted binary trees. Our result shows that a certain generalized approach to tackling this open problem is not promising. As a corollary of our theorem, we prove that the computation of a combinatorial shortest path between two vertices of a polymatroid base polytope cannot be done in polynomial time unless P = NP. Since a combinatorial shortest path on the matroid base polytope can be computed in polynomial time, our result reveals an unexpected contrast between matroids and polymatroids.

math.CO