No Countable Basis for Borel Directed Graphs of Dichromatic Number at Least Three
Abstract
I prove that the Borel directed graphs whose vertex set admits a partition into two Borel acyclic sets form a -complete set; equivalently, that deciding whether a Borel directed graph has Borel dichromatic number at least~ is a -complete problem. It follows that no countable family of Borel directed graphs can serve as a basis for this class under Borel homomorphism and, more generally, that any basis must be at least as complex as~. The proof lifts the classical NP-completeness reduction of Bokal, Fijav\v{z}, Juvan, Kayll, and Mohar to the Borel setting, using the coding framework of Thornton. Combined with a straightforward reduction from undirected to directed coloring problems, this completes the picture for finite Borel chromatic and dichromatic thresholds: for every finite , the set of Borel (directed) graphs admitting a Borel -(di)coloring is -complete, and in particular admits no countable basis. This contrasts with the uncountable threshold, where a single-element basis exists for Borel chromatic number (Kechris--Solecki--Todor\v{c}evi\'c) and a continuum-size basis exists for Borel dichromatic number (Raghavan--Xiao).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.05228,
title = {No Countable Basis for Borel Directed Graphs of Dichromatic Number at Least Three},
author = {Tonatiuh Matos-Wiederhold},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.05228},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
10 pages, 1 figure