English

Excluding induced subdivisions of the bull and related graphs

Combinatorics 2013-09-06 v1

Abstract

For any graph HH, let Forb(H){\rm Forb}^*(H) be the class of graphs with no induced subdivision of HH. It was conjectured in [A.D. Scott, Induced trees in graphs of large chromatic number, {\em Journal of Graph Theory}, 24:297--311, 1997] that, for every graph HH, there is a function fH:NRf_H:\mathbb{N} \rightarrow \mathbb{R} such that for every graph GForb(H)G \in {\rm Forb}^*(H), χ(G)fH(ω(G))\chi(G) \leq f_H(\omega(G)). We prove this conjecture for several graphs HH, namely the paw (a triangle with a pendant edge), the bull (a triangle with two vertex-disjoint pendant edges), and what we call a "necklace," that is, a graph obtained from a path by choosing a matching such that no edge of the matching is incident with an endpoint of the path, and for each edge of the matching, adding a vertex adjacent to the ends of this edge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1309.1312,
  title  = {Excluding induced subdivisions of the bull and related graphs},
  author = {Maria Chudnovsky and Irena Penev and Alexander Scott and Nicolas Trotignon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.1312},
  year   = {2013}
}