English

On heroes in digraphs with forbidden induced forests

Combinatorics 2023-06-09 v1

Abstract

We continue a line of research which studies which hereditary families of digraphs have bounded dichromatic number. For a class of digraphs C\mathcal{C}, a hero in C\mathcal{C} is any digraph HH such that HH-free digraphs in C\mathcal{C} have bounded dichromatic number. We show that if FF is an oriented star of degree at least five, the only heroes for the class of FF-free digraphs are transitive tournaments. For oriented stars FF of degree exactly four, we show the only heroes in FF-free digraphs are transitive tournaments, or possibly special joins of transitive tournaments. Aboulker et al. characterized the set of heroes of {H,K1+P2}\{H, K_{1} + \vec{P_{2}}\}-free digraphs almost completely, and we show the same characterization for the class of {H,rK1+P3}\{H, rK_{1} + \vec{P_{3}}\}-free digraphs. Lastly, we show that if we forbid two "valid" orientations of brooms, then every transitive tournament is a hero for this class of digraphs.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.04710,
  title  = {On heroes in digraphs with forbidden induced forests},
  author = {Alvaro Carbonero and Hidde Koerts and Benjamin Moore and Sophie Spirkl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.04710},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:59:17.437Z