English

Injective edge-coloring of claw-free graphs with maximum degree 4

Combinatorics 2025-09-12 v1

Abstract

An injective kk-edge-coloring of a graph GG is a mapping ϕ\phi: E(G){1,2,...,k}E(G)\rightarrow\{1,2,...,k\}, such that ϕ(e)ϕ(e)\phi(e)\ne\phi(e') if edges ee and ee' are at distance two, or are in a triangle. The smallest integer kk such that GG has an injective kk-edge-coloring is called the injective chromatic index of GG, denoted by χi(G)\chi_i'(G). A graph is called claw-free if it has no induced subgraph isomorphic to the complete bipartite graph K1,3K_{1,3}. In this paper, we show that χi(G)13\chi_i'(G)\le 13 for every claw-free graph GG with Δ(G)4\Delta(G)\leq 4, where Δ(G)\Delta(G) is the maximum degree of GG.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.09407,
  title  = {Injective edge-coloring of claw-free graphs with maximum degree 4},
  author = {Danjun Huang and Yuqian Guo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.09407},
  year   = {2025}
}