English

List colouring with a bounded palette

Combinatorics 2017-07-19 v2

Abstract

Kr\'al' and Sgall (2005) introduced a refinement of list colouring where every colour list must be subset to one predetermined palette of colours. We call this (k,)(k,\ell)-choosability when the palette is of size at most \ell and the lists must be of size at least kk. They showed that, for any integer k2k\ge 2, there is an integer C=C(k,2k1)C=C(k,2k-1), satisfying C=O(16klnk)C = O(16^{k}\ln k) as kk\to \infty, such that, if a graph is (k,2k1)(k,2k-1)-choosable, then it is CC-choosable, and asked if CC is required to be exponential in kk. We demonstrate it must satisfy C=Ω(4k/k)C = \Omega(4^k/\sqrt{k}). For an integer 2k1\ell \ge 2k-1, if C(k,)C(k,\ell) is the least integer such that a graph is C(k,)C(k,\ell)-choosable if it is (k,)(k,\ell)-choosable, then we more generally supply a lower bound on C(k,)C(k,\ell), one that is super-polynomial in kk if =o(k2/lnk)\ell = o(k^2/\ln k), by relation to an extremal set theoretic property. By the use of containers, we also give upper bounds on C(k,)C(k,\ell) that improve on earlier bounds if 2.75k\ell \ge 2.75 k.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.03495,
  title  = {List colouring with a bounded palette},
  author = {Marthe Bonamy and Ross J. Kang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.03495},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

12 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; to appear in Journal of Graph Theory

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:10:51.438Z