English

Borel Polychromatic Number of Grids

Logic 2025-08-27 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We study Borel polychromatic colorings of grid graphs arising from free Borel actions of Zd\mathbb{Z}^d. A polychromatic coloring is one in which every unit dd-dimensional cube sees all available colors. In the classical setting, every grid admits a 2d2^d-polychromatic coloring, while in the Borel setting this fails. Our main result shows that every free Zd\mathbb{Z}^d-action admits a Borel (2d1)(2^d-1)-polychromatic coloring. This result is sharp: any action where the generators act ergodically does not admit a Borel 2d2^d-polychromatic coloring. We conclude with open directions for extending the theory beyond cube tilings and for exploring the dependence of Borel polychromatic numbers on the underlying action.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.18559,
  title  = {Borel Polychromatic Number of Grids},
  author = {Katalin Berlow and Edward Hou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.18559},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 3 figures