A new upper bound on the acyclic chromatic indices of planar graphs

An acyclic edge coloring of a graph G$G$ is a proper edge coloring such that no bichromatic cycles are produced. The acyclic chromatic index a^′(G)$a^{\prime }\left(G\right)$ of G$G$ is the smallest integer k$k$ such that G$G$ has an acyclic edge coloring using k$k$ colors. It was conjectured that a^′(G)≤Δ+2$a^{\prime }\left(G\right)\le \Delta +2$ for any simple graph G$G$ with maximum degree Δ$\Delta$. In this paper, we prove that if G$G$ is a planar graph, then a^′(G)≤Δ+7$a^{\prime }\left(G\right)\le \Delta +7$. This improves a result by Basavaraju et al. M. Basavaraju, L.S. Chandran, N. Cohen, F. Havet, T. Müller, Acyclic edge-coloring of planar graphs, SIAM J. Discrete Math. 25 (2011) 463–478], which says that every planar graph G$G$ satisfies a^′(G)≤Δ+12$a^{\prime }\left(G\right)\le \Delta +12$.