English

Hadwiger's Conjecture for $\{\text{co-claw}, \text{co-gem}\}$-free graphs and $\{\text{fork}, \text{antifork}\}$-free graphs

Combinatorics 2026-05-28 v1

Abstract

We prove Hadwiger's Conjecture for {co-claw,co-gem}\{\text{co-claw}, \text{co-gem}\}-free graphs and {fork,antifork}\{\text{fork}, \text{antifork}\}-free graphs, where the co-claw is the disjoint union of a triangle and a vertex, the co-gem is the disjoint union of a 4-vertex path and a vertex, the fork is obtained from K1,3K_{1,3} by subdividing one of the edges, and the antifork is the complement of the fork. The {co-claw,co-gem}\{\text{co-claw}, \text{co-gem}\}-free graphs include the complements of line graphs of triangle-free multigraphs, and thus our results imply Hadwiger's Conjecture for these graphs. In fact, we prove a stronger result: every {co-claw,co-gem}\{\text{co-claw}, \text{co-gem}\}-free graph GG has a Kχ(G)K_{\chi(G)}-model where each branch set has size at most 2, and every {fork,antifork}\{\text{fork}, \text{antifork}\}-free graph GG has a Kχ(G)K_{\chi(G)}-model where at most one branch set has size greater than 2.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.28050,
  title  = {Hadwiger's Conjecture for $\{\text{co-claw}, \text{co-gem}\}$-free graphs and $\{\text{fork}, \text{antifork}\}$-free graphs},
  author = {Daniel Carter and Jung Hon Yip},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.28050},
  year   = {2026}
}