English

Planar graphs without cycles of length 4 or 5 are $(7m:2m)$-DP-colorable

Combinatorics 2025-11-18 v1

Abstract

It was conjectured by Steinberg in 1976 that planar graphs without cycles of length 4 or 5 are 3-colorable. This conjecture attracted a substantial amount of attention and was finally refuted by Cohen-Addad, Hebdige, Kr\'{a}l', Li and Salgado in 2017. Although Steinberg's conjecture is settled, coloring of this family of graphs, as well as some other families of planar graphs forbidding certain cycle lengths have been attracting a lot of recent attention and many challenging problems remain open. One problem of interest is multiple coloring and multiple list coloring of this family of graphs. It was proved by Dv\v{o}r\'{a}k and Hu that planar graphs without cycles of length 4 or 5 are (11,3)(11,3)-colorable, and this result was improved by Wang, who proved that graphs in this family are (7:2)(7:2)-colorable. On the other hand, it was proved by Xu and Zhu that for every positive integer mm, there is a graph in this family which is not (3m+m112,m)(3m + \lfloor \frac{m-1}{12} \rfloor, m)-choosable. In this paper, we prove that for any positive integer mm, graphs in this family are (7m:2m)(7m:2m)-DP-colorable, and hence (7m,2m)(7m,2m)-choosable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.12914,
  title  = {Planar graphs without cycles of length 4 or 5 are $(7m:2m)$-DP-colorable},
  author = {Xiaoyan Xu and Xuding Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.12914},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

13 pages, 2 figures