English

Kempe Chains and Rooted Minors

Combinatorics 2022-11-30 v2

Abstract

A (minimal) transversal of a partition is a set which contains exactly one element from each member of the partition and nothing else. A coloring of a graph is a partition of its vertex set into anticliques, that is, sets of pairwise nonadjacent vertices. We study the following problem: Given a transversal TT of a proper coloring C\mathfrak{C} of some graph GG, is there a partition H\mathfrak{H} of a subset of V(G)V(G) into connected sets such that TT is a transversal of H\mathfrak{H} and such that two sets of H\mathfrak{H} are adjacent if their corresponding vertices from TT are connected by a path in GG using only two colors? It has been suggested by the first author to study the following question: for any transversal TT of a coloring C\mathfrak{C} of order kk of some graph GG such that any pair of color classes induces a connected graph, does there exist such a partition H\mathfrak{H} with pairwise adjacent sets (which would prove Hadwiger's Conjecture for the class of uniquely optimally colorable graphs)? This is open for small k5k \geq 5, here we give a proof for the case that k=5k=5 and the subgraph induced by TT is connected. Moreover, we show that for k7k\geq 7, it is not sufficient for the existence of H\mathfrak{H} as above just to force any two transversal vertices to be connected by a 2-colored path.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.09998,
  title  = {Kempe Chains and Rooted Minors},
  author = {Matthias Kriesell and Samuel Mohr},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09998},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:24:26.823Z