Disjoint Hamilton cycles in the random geometric graph

We consider the standard random geometric graph process in which n vertices are placed at random on the unit square and edges are sequentially added in increasing order of edge-length. For fixed k⩾1, weprove that the first edge in the process that creates a k-connected graph coincides a.a.s. with the first edge that causes the graph to contain k/2 pairwise edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles (for even k), or (k−1)/2 Hamilton cycles plus one perfect matching, all of them pairwise edge-disjoint (for odd k). This proves and extends a conjecture of Krivelevich and M **image**ler. In the special case when k = 2, our result says that the first edge that makes the random geometric graph Hamiltonian is a.a.s. exactly the same one that gives 2-connectivity, which answers a question of Penrose. (This result appeared in three independent preprints, one of which was a precursor to this article.) We prove our results with lengths measured using the lp norm for any p>1, and we also extend our result to higher dimensions. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 68:299-322, 2011 © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.