English

Edge coloring of graphs of signed class 1 and 2

Discrete Mathematics 2023-07-25 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

Recently, Behr introduced a notion of the chromatic index of signed graphs and proved that for every signed graph (G(G, σ)\sigma) it holds that Δ(G)χ(Gσ)Δ(G)+1, \Delta(G)\leq\chi'(G\text{, }\sigma)\leq\Delta(G)+1\text{,} where Δ(G)\Delta(G) is the maximum degree of GG and χ\chi' denotes its chromatic index. In general, the chromatic index of (G(G, σ)\sigma) depends on both the underlying graph GG and the signature σ\sigma. In the paper we study graphs GG for which χ(G\chi'(G, σ)\sigma) does not depend on σ\sigma. To this aim we introduce two new classes of graphs, namely 1±1^\pm and 2±2^\pm, such that graph GG is of class 1±1^\pm (respectively, 2±2^\pm) if and only if χ(G\chi'(G, σ)=Δ(G)\sigma)=\Delta(G) (respectively, χ(G\chi'(G, σ)=Δ(G)+1\sigma)=\Delta(G)+1) for all possible signatures σ\sigma. We prove that all wheels, necklaces, complete bipartite graphs Kr,tK_{r,t} with rtr\neq t and almost all cacti graphs are of class 1±1^\pm. Moreover, we give sufficient and necessary conditions for a graph to be of class 2±2^\pm, i.e. we show that these graphs must have odd maximum degree and give examples of such graphs with arbitrary odd maximum degree bigger that 11.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.15425,
  title  = {Edge coloring of graphs of signed class 1 and 2},
  author = {Robert Janczewski and Krzysztof Turowski and Bartłomiej Wróblewski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.15425},
  year   = {2023}
}