Identifying codes in triangle-free graphs of bounded maximum degree

An $\textit{identifying code}$ of a closed-twin-free graph $G$ is a set $S$ of vertices of $G$ such that any two vertices in $G$ have a distinct intersection between their closed neighborhood and $S$. It was conjectured that there exists a constant $c$ such that for every connected closed-twin-free graph $G$ of order $n$ and maximum degree $\Delta$, the graph $G$ admits an identifying code of size at most $\left( \frac{\Delta-1}{\Delta} \right) n+c$. In [D. Chakraborty, F. Foucaud, M. A. Henning, and T. Lehtil\"{a}. Identifying codes in graphs of given maximum degree: Characterizing trees. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13172, 2024], we proved the conjecture for all trees. In this article, we show that the conjecture holds for all triangle-free graphs, with the same list of exceptional graphs needing $c>0$ as for trees: for $\Delta\ge 3$, $c=1/3$ suffices and there is only a set of 12 trees requiring $c>0$ for $\Delta=3$, and when $\Delta\ge 4$ this set is reduced to the $\Delta$-star only. Our proof is by induction, whose starting point is the above result for trees. Along the way, we prove a generalized version of Bondy's theorem on induced subsets [J. A. Bondy. Induced subsets. Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 1972] that we use as a tool in our proofs. We also use our main result for triangle-free graphs, to prove the upper bound $\left( \frac{\Delta-1}{\Delta} \right) n+1/\Delta+4t$ for graphs that can be made triangle-free by the removal of $t$ edges.