English

On graphs with no induced five-vertex path or paraglider

Combinatorics 2019-03-28 v1 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Given two graphs H1H_1 and H2H_2, a graph is (H1,H2)(H_1,\,H_2)-free if it contains no induced subgraph isomorphic to H1H_1 or H2H_2. For a positive integer tt, PtP_t is the chordless path on tt vertices. A paraglider is the graph that consists of a chorless cycle C4C_4 plus a vertex adjacent to three vertices of the C4C_4. In this paper, we study the structure of (P5P_5, paraglider)-free graphs, and show that every such graph GG satisfies χ(G)32ω(G)\chi(G)\le \lceil \frac{3}{2}\omega(G) \rceil, where χ(G)\chi(G) and ω(G)\omega(G) are the chromatic number and clique number of GG, respectively. Our bound is attained by the complement of the Clebsch graph on 16 vertices. More strongly, we completely characterize all the (P5P_5, paraglider)-free graphs GG that satisfies χ(G)>32ω(G)\chi(G)> \frac{3}{2}\omega(G). We also construct an infinite family of (P5P_5, paraglider)-free graphs such that every graph GG in the family has χ(G)=32ω(G)1\chi(G)=\lceil \frac{3}{2}\omega(G) \rceil-1. This shows that our upper bound is optimal up to an additive constant and that there is no (32ϵ)(\frac{3}{2}-\epsilon)-approximation algorithm to the chromatic number of (P5P_5, paraglider)-free graphs for any ϵ>0\epsilon>0.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.11268,
  title  = {On graphs with no induced five-vertex path or paraglider},
  author = {Shenwei Huang and T. Karthick},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.11268},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:20:26.517Z