Antidirected forests in digraphs

Abstract

A digraph is antidirected if every vertex has indegree zero or outdegree zero. Let $k\ge2$, and let $F$ be an antidirected forest with $k$ arcs and no isolated vertices. We prove that every digraph $D$ of order $n$ with more than $g_k(n):=2\max\left\{\binom{2k-1}{2}, (k-1)\left(n-\frac{k}{2}\right)\right\}$ arcs contains $F$ as a subdigraph. For $n\ge2k-1$, this threshold equals $2\mathrm{ex}(n,kK_2)$ and is attained by symmetric digraphs arising from extremal $kK_2$-free graphs. Consequently, the maximum directed extremal number over all such forests is $2\mathrm{ex}(n,kK_2)$. The proof combines a counting inequality for rooted antidirected forests, embeddings extending vertex-disjoint arcs, and vertex deletion. In the remaining case, the Gallai--Edmonds decomposition of the underlying graph gives the required bound on the number of arcs.