2,318 research outputs found
An elementary chromatic reduction for gain graphs and special hyperplane arrangements
A gain graph is a graph whose edges are labelled invertibly by "gains" from a
group. "Switching" is a transformation of gain graphs that generalizes
conjugation in a group. A "weak chromatic function" of gain graphs with gains
in a fixed group satisfies three laws: deletion-contraction for links with
neutral gain, invariance under switching, and nullity on graphs with a neutral
loop. The laws lead to the "weak chromatic group" of gain graphs, which is the
universal domain for weak chromatic functions. We find expressions, valid in
that group, for a gain graph in terms of minors without neutral-gain edges, or
with added complete neutral-gain subgraphs, that generalize the expression of
an ordinary chromatic polynomial in terms of monomials or falling factorials.
These expressions imply relations for chromatic functions of gain graphs.
We apply our relations to some special integral gain graphs including those
that correspond to the Shi, Linial, and Catalan arrangements, thereby obtaining
new evaluations of and new ways to calculate the zero-free chromatic polynomial
and the integral and modular chromatic functions of these gain graphs, hence
the characteristic polynomials and hypercubical lattice-point counting
functions of the arrangements. We also calculate the total chromatic polynomial
of any gain graph and especially of the Catalan, Shi, and Linial gain graphs.Comment: 31 page
Cubical coloring -- fractional covering by cuts and semidefinite programming
We introduce a new graph invariant that measures fractional covering of a
graph by cuts. Besides being interesting in its own right, it is useful for
study of homomorphisms and tension-continuous mappings. We study the relations
with chromatic number, bipartite density, and other graph parameters.
We find the value of our parameter for a family of graphs based on
hypercubes. These graphs play for our parameter the role that circular cliques
play for the circular chromatic number. The fact that the defined parameter
attains on these graphs the `correct' value suggests that the definition is a
natural one. In the proof we use the eigenvalue bound for maximum cut and a
recent result of Engstr\"om, F\"arnqvist, Jonsson, and Thapper.
We also provide a polynomial time approximation algorithm based on
semidefinite programming and in particular on vector chromatic number (defined
by Karger, Motwani and Sudan [Approximate graph coloring by semidefinite
programming, J. ACM 45 (1998), no. 2, 246--265]).Comment: 17 page
An inertial lower bound for the chromatic number of a graph
Let ) and denote the chromatic and fractional chromatic
numbers of a graph , and let denote the inertia of .
We prove that:
1 + \max\left(\frac{n^+}{n^-} , \frac{n^-}{n^+}\right) \le \chi(G) \mbox{
and conjecture that } 1 + \max\left(\frac{n^+}{n^-} , \frac{n^-}{n^+}\right)
\le \chi_f(G)
We investigate extremal graphs for these bounds and demonstrate that this
inertial bound is not a lower bound for the vector chromatic number. We
conclude with a discussion of asymmetry between and , including some
Nordhaus-Gaddum bounds for inertia
Defective and Clustered Graph Colouring
Consider the following two ways to colour the vertices of a graph where the
requirement that adjacent vertices get distinct colours is relaxed. A colouring
has "defect" if each monochromatic component has maximum degree at most
. A colouring has "clustering" if each monochromatic component has at
most vertices. This paper surveys research on these types of colourings,
where the first priority is to minimise the number of colours, with small
defect or small clustering as a secondary goal. List colouring variants are
also considered. The following graph classes are studied: outerplanar graphs,
planar graphs, graphs embeddable in surfaces, graphs with given maximum degree,
graphs with given maximum average degree, graphs excluding a given subgraph,
graphs with linear crossing number, linklessly or knotlessly embeddable graphs,
graphs with given Colin de Verdi\`ere parameter, graphs with given
circumference, graphs excluding a fixed graph as an immersion, graphs with
given thickness, graphs with given stack- or queue-number, graphs excluding
as a minor, graphs excluding as a minor, and graphs excluding
an arbitrary graph as a minor. Several open problems are discussed.Comment: This is a preliminary version of a dynamic survey to be published in
the Electronic Journal of Combinatoric
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