English

Remarks on the subdivisions of bispindles and two-blocks cycles in highly chromatic digraphs

Combinatorics 2020-10-22 v1

Abstract

A (2+1)(2+1)-bispindle B(k1,k2;k3)B(k_1,k_2;k_3) is the union of two xyxy-dipaths of respective lengths k1k_1 and k2k_2, and one yxyx-dipath of length k3k_3, all these dipaths being pairwise internally disjoint. Recently, Cohen et al. conjectured that, for every positive integers k1,k2,k3k_1, k_2, k_3, there is an integer g(k1,k2,k3)g(k_1, k_2, k_3) such that every strongly connected digraph not containing subdivisions of B(k1,k2;k3)B(k_1, k_2; k_3) has a chromatic number at most g(k1,k2,k3)g(k_1, k_2, k_3), and they proved it only for the case where k2=1k_2=1. For Hamiltonian digraphs, we prove Cohen et al.'s conjecture, namely g(k1,k2,k3)4kg(k_1, k_2, k_3)\leq 4k, where k=max{k1,k2,k3}k=max\{k_1, k_2, k_3\}. A two-blocks cycle C(k1,k2)C(k_1,k_2) is the union of two internally disjoint xyxy-dipaths of length k1k_1 and k2k_2 respectively. Addario et al. asked if the chromatic number of strong digraphs not containing subdivisions of a two-blocks cycle C(k1,k2)C(k_1,k_2) can be bounded from above by O(k1+k2)O(k_1+k_2), which remains an open problem. Assuming that k=max{k1,k2}k=max\{k_1,k_2\}, the best reached upper bound, found by Kim et al., is 12k212k^2. In this article, we conjecture that this bound can be slightly improved to 4k24k^2 and we confirm our conjecture for some particular cases. Moreover, we provide a positive answer to Addario et al.'s question for the class of digraphs having a Hamiltonian directed path.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2010.10787,
  title  = {Remarks on the subdivisions of bispindles and two-blocks cycles in highly chromatic digraphs},
  author = {Darine Al Mniny and Salman Ghazal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.10787},
  year   = {2020}
}