English

Bad list assignments for non-$k$-choosable $k$-chromatic graphs with $2k+2$-vertices

Combinatorics 2022-02-22 v1

Abstract

It was conjectured by Ohba, and proved by Noel, Reed and Wu that kk-chromatic graphs GG with V(G)2k+1|V(G)| \le 2k+1 are chromatic-choosable. This upper bound on V(G)|V(G)| is tight: if kk is even, then K3(k/2+1),1(k/21)K_{3 \star (k/2+1), 1 \star (k/2-1)} and K4,2(k1)K_{4, 2 \star (k-1)} are kk-chromatic graphs with 2k+22 k+2 vertices that are not chromatic-choosable. It was proved in [arXiv:2201.02060] that these are the only non-kk-choosable complete kk-partite graphs with 2k+22k+2 vertices. For G=K3(k/2+1),1(k/21)G =K_{3 \star (k/2+1), 1 \star (k/2-1)} or K4,2(k1)K_{4, 2 \star (k-1)}, a bad list assignment of GG is a kk-list assignment LL of GG such that GG is not LL-colourable. Bad list assignments for G=K4,2(k1)G=K_{4, 2 \star (k-1)} were characterized in [Discrete Mathematics 244 (2002), 55-66]. In this paper, we first give a simpler proof of this result, and then we characterize bad list assignments for G=K3(k/2+1),1(k/21)G=K_{3 \star (k/2+1), 1 \star (k/2-1)}. Using these results, we characterize all non-kk-choosable (non-complete) kk-partite graphs with 2k+22k+2 vertices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.09756,
  title  = {Bad list assignments for non-$k$-choosable $k$-chromatic graphs with $2k+2$-vertices},
  author = {Jialu Zhu and Xuding Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.09756},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

13 pages, 1 figure