21,485 research outputs found
Structure and colour in triangle-free graphs
Motivated by a recent conjecture of the first author, we prove that every
properly coloured triangle-free graph of chromatic number contains a
rainbow independent set of size . This is sharp up to
a factor . This result and its short proof have implications for the related
notion of chromatic discrepancy.
Drawing inspiration from both structural and extremal graph theory, we
conjecture that every triangle-free graph of chromatic number contains
an induced cycle of length as . Even if
one only demands an induced path of length , the
conclusion would be sharp up to a constant multiple. We prove it for regular
girth graphs and for girth graphs.
As a common strengthening of the induced paths form of this conjecture and of
Johansson's theorem (1996), we posit the existence of some such that for
every forest on vertices, every triangle-free and induced -free
graph has chromatic number at most . We prove this assertion with
`triangle-free' replaced by `regular girth '.Comment: 12 pages; in v2 one section was removed due to a subtle erro
Topics in graph colouring and extremal graph theory
In this thesis we consider three problems related to colourings of graphs and one problem in extremal graph theory. Let be a connected graph with vertices and maximum degree . Let denote the graph with vertex set all proper -colourings of and two -colourings are joined by an edge if they differ on the colour of exactly one vertex.
Our first main result states that has a unique non-trivial component with diameter . This result can be viewed as a reconfigurations analogue of Brooks' Theorem and completes the study of reconfigurations of colourings of graphs with bounded maximum degree.
A Kempe change is the operation of swapping some colours , of a component of the subgraph induced by vertices with colour or . Two colourings are Kempe equivalent if one can be obtained from the other by a sequence of Kempe changes. Our second main result states that all -colourings of a graph are Kempe equivalent unless is the complete graph or the triangular prism. This settles a conjecture of Mohar (2007).
Motivated by finding an algorithmic version of a structure theorem for bull-free graphs due to Chudnovsky (2012), we consider the computational complexity of deciding if the vertices of a graph can be partitioned into two parts such that one part is triangle-free and the other part is a collection of complete graphs. We show that this problem is NP-complete when restricted to five classes of graphs (including bull-free graphs) while polynomial-time solvable for the class of cographs.
Finally we consider a graph-theoretic version formulated by Holroyd, Spencer and Talbot (2007) of the famous Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado Theorem in extremal combinatorics and obtain some results for the class of trees
On the minimum degree of minimal Ramsey graphs for multiple colours
A graph G is r-Ramsey for a graph H, denoted by G\rightarrow (H)_r, if every
r-colouring of the edges of G contains a monochromatic copy of H. The graph G
is called r-Ramsey-minimal for H if it is r-Ramsey for H but no proper subgraph
of G possesses this property. Let s_r(H) denote the smallest minimum degree of
G over all graphs G that are r-Ramsey-minimal for H. The study of the parameter
s_2 was initiated by Burr, Erd\H{o}s, and Lov\'{a}sz in 1976 when they showed
that for the clique s_2(K_k)=(k-1)^2. In this paper, we study the dependency of
s_r(K_k) on r and show that, under the condition that k is constant, s_r(K_k) =
r^2 polylog r. We also give an upper bound on s_r(K_k) which is polynomial in
both r and k, and we determine s_r(K_3) up to a factor of log r
Reconfiguring Graph Homomorphisms on the Sphere
Given a loop-free graph , the reconfiguration problem for homomorphisms to
(also called -colourings) asks: given two -colourings of of a
graph , is it possible to transform into by a sequence of
single-vertex colour changes such that every intermediate mapping is an
-colouring? This problem is known to be polynomial-time solvable for a wide
variety of graphs (e.g. all -free graphs) but only a handful of hard
cases are known. We prove that this problem is PSPACE-complete whenever is
a -free quadrangulation of the -sphere (equivalently, the plane)
which is not a -cycle. From this result, we deduce an analogous statement
for non-bipartite -free quadrangulations of the projective plane. This
include several interesting classes of graphs, such as odd wheels, for which
the complexity was known, and -chromatic generalized Mycielski graphs, for
which it was not.
If we instead consider graphs and with loops on every vertex (i.e.
reflexive graphs), then the reconfiguration problem is defined in a similar way
except that a vertex can only change its colour to a neighbour of its current
colour. In this setting, we use similar ideas to show that the reconfiguration
problem for -colourings is PSPACE-complete whenever is a reflexive
-free triangulation of the -sphere which is not a reflexive triangle.
This proof applies more generally to reflexive graphs which, roughly speaking,
resemble a triangulation locally around a particular vertex. This provides the
first graphs for which -Recolouring is known to be PSPACE-complete for
reflexive instances.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure
A note on 2--bisections of claw--free cubic graphs
A \emph{--bisection} of a bridgeless cubic graph is a --colouring
of its vertex set such that the colour classes have the same cardinality and
all connected components in the two subgraphs induced by the colour classes
have order at most . Ban and Linial conjectured that {\em every bridgeless
cubic graph admits a --bisection except for the Petersen graph}.
In this note, we prove Ban--Linial's conjecture for claw--free cubic graphs
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