English

Seymour and Woodall's conjecture holds for graphs with independence number two

Combinatorics 2025-02-20 v3

Abstract

Woodall (and Seymour independently) in 2001 proposed a conjecture that every graph GG contains every complete bipartite graph on χ(G)\chi(G) vertices as a minor, where χ(G)\chi(G) is the chromatic number of GG. In this paper, we prove that for each positive integer \ell with 2χ(G)2\ell \leq \chi(G), each graph GG with independence number two contains a K,χ(G)K^{\ell}_{\ell,\chi(G)-\ell}-minor, implying that Seymour and Woodall's conjecture holds for graphs with independence number two, where K,χ(G)K^{\ell}_{\ell,\chi(G)-\ell} is the graph obtained from K,χ(G)K_{\ell,\chi(G)-\ell} by making every pair of vertices on the side of the bipartition of size \ell adjacent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.02643,
  title  = {Seymour and Woodall's conjecture holds for graphs with independence number two},
  author = {Rong Chen and Zijian Deng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.02643},
  year   = {2025}
}