A note on the small quasi-kernels conjecture in digraphs

A subset $K$ of vertices of digraph $D=(V(D),A(D))$ is a kernel if the following two conditions are fulfilled: (i) no two vertices of $K$ are connected by an arc in any direction and (ii) every vertex not in $K$ has an ingoing arc from some vertex in $K.$ A quasi-kernel of $D$ is a subset $Q$ of vertices satisfying condition (i) and furthermore every vertex can be reached in at most two steps from $Q.$ A vertex is source-free if it has at least one ingoing arc. In 1976, P.L. Erdös and L.A. Székely conjectured that every source-free digraph $D$ has a quasi-kernel of size at most $\left\vert V(D)\right\vert /2.$ Recently, this conjecture has been shown to be true by Allan van Hulst for digraphs having kernels. In this note, we provide a short and simple proof of van Hulst’s result. We additionally characterize all source-free digraphs $D$ having kernels with smallest quasi-kernels of size $\left\vert V(D)\right\vert /2.$