Planar graphs decomposable into a forest and a matching

He, Hou, Lih, Shao, Wang, and Zhu showed that a planar graph of girth 11 can be decomposed into a forest and a matching. Borodin, Kostochka, Sheikh, and Yu improved the bound on girth to 9. We give sufficient conditions for a planar graph with 3-cycles to be decomposable into a forest and a matching.     

Partitioning a Planar Graph of Girth 10 into a Forest and a Matching

We prove that any finite planar graph with girth at least 10 can have its edges partitioned to form two graphs on the same vertices, one of which is a forest, and the other of which is a matching. Several related results are also demonstrated.     

Acyclic 5-choosability of planar graphs without 4-cycles

The conjecture on the acyclic 5-choosability of planar graphs (Borodin et al., 2002) as yet has been verified only for several restricted classes of graphs: those of girth at least 5 (Montassier, Ochem, and Raspaud, 2006), without 4- and 5-cycles or without 4- and 6-cycles (Montassier, Raspaud, and Wang, 2007), with neither 4-cycles nor chordal 6-cycles (Zhang and Xu, 2009), with neither 4- cycles nor two 3-cycles at distance less than 3 (Chen and Wang, 2008), and with neither 4-cycles nor intersecting 3-cycles (Chen and Raspaud, 2010). Wang and Chen (2009) proved that the planar graphs without 4-cycles are acyclically 6-choosable. We prove that a planar graph without 4-cycles is acyclically 5-choosable, which is a common strengthening of all above-mentioned results.     

无8-,9-和10-圈的平面图的3-可选择性

寻找平面图是3-或者4-可选择的充分条件是图的染色理论中一个重要研究课题,本文研究了围长至少是4的特殊平面图的选择数,通过权转移的方法证明了每个围长至少是4且不合8-圈,9-圈和10-圈的平面图是3-可选择的．     

List 2-facial 5-colorability of plane graphs with girth at least 12

A proper vertex coloring of a plane graph is 2-facial if any two different vertices joined by a facial walk of length 2 are colored differently, and it is 2-distance if every two vertices at distance 2 from each other are colored differently. Note that any 2-facial coloring of a subcubic graph is 2-distance.It is known that every plane graph with girth at least 14 has a 2-facial 5-coloring [M. Montassier, A. Raspaud, A note on 2-facial coloring of plane graphs. Inform. Process. Lett. 98 (6) (2006) 235–241], and that every planar subcubic graph with girth at least 13 has a list 2-distance 5-coloring [F. Havet, Choosability of square of planar subcubic graphs with large girth, Discrete Math. 309 (2009) 3353–3563].We strengthen these results by proving the list 2-facial 5-colorability of plane graphs with girth at least 12.     

Acyclic 3-choosability of planar graphs without cycles of length from 4 to 12

Every planar graph is known to be acyclically 7-choosable and is conjectured to be acyclically 5-choosable (O. V. Borodin et al., 2002). This conjecture if proved would imply both Borodin’s acyclic 5-color theorem (1979) and Thomassen’s 5-choosability theorem (1994). However, as yet it has been verified only for several restricted classes of graphs. Some sufficient conditions are also obtained for a planar graph to be acyclically 4- and 3-colorable. In particular, a planar graph of girth at least 7 is acyclically 3-colorable (O. V. Borodin, A. V. Kostochka and D. R. Woodall, 1999) and acyclically 3-choosable (O. V. Borodin et. al, 2009). A natural measure of sparseness, introduced by Erdős and Steinberg, is the absence of k-cycles, where 4 ≤ k ≤ S. Here, we prove that every planar graph without cycles of length from 4 to 12 is acyclically 3-choosable.     

The parameterized complexity of the induced matching problem

Given a graph G and an integer k≥0, the NP-complete Induced Matching problem asks whether there exists an edge subset M of size at least k such that M is a matching and no two edges of M are joined by an edge of G. The complexity of this problem on general graphs, as well as on many restricted graph classes has been studied intensively. However, other than the fact that the problem is W[1]-hard on general graphs, little is known about the parameterized complexity of the problem in restricted graph classes. In this work, we provide first-time fixed-parameter tractability results for planar graphs, bounded-degree graphs, graphs with girth at least six, bipartite graphs, line graphs, and graphs of bounded treewidth. In particular, we give a linear-size problem kernel for planar graphs.     

On circle graphs with girth at least five

Circle graphs with girth at least five are known to be 2-degenerate [A.A. Ageev, Every circle graph with girth at least 5 is 3-colourable, Discrete Math. 195 (1999) 229-233]. In this paper, we prove that circle graphs with girth at least g≥5 and minimum degree at least two contain a chain of g−4 vertices of degree two, which implies Ageev’s result in the case g=5. We then use this structural property to give an upper bound on the circular chromatic number of circle graphs with girth at least g≥5 as well as a precise estimate of their maximum average degree.     

Subcubic planar graphs of girth 7 are class I

We prove that planar graphs of maximum degree 3 and of girth at least 7 are 3-edge-colorable, extending the previous result for girth at least 8 by Kronk, Radlowski, and Franen from 1974.     

On circle graphs with girth at least five

Circle graphs with girth at least five are known to be 2-degenerate (Ageev, 1999). In this paper, we prove that circle graphs with girth at least g ⩾ 5 contain a vertex of degree at most one, or a chain of g− 4 vertices of degree two, which implies Ageev's result in the case g = 5. We then use this structural property to give an upper bound on the circular chromatic number of circle graphs with girth at least g ⩾ 5 as well as a precise estimate of their maximum average degree.     

3-list-coloring planar graphs of girth 4

In Thomassen (1995) [4], Thomassen proved that planar graphs of girth at least 5 are 3-choosable. In Li (2009) [3], Li improved Thomassen’s result by proving that planar graphs of girth 4 with no 4-cycle sharing a vertex with another 4- or 5-cycle are 3-choosable. In this paper, we prove that planar graphs of girth 4 with no 4-cycle sharing an edge with another 4- or 5-cycle are 3-choosable. It is clear that our result strengthens Li’s result.     

Partitions of Graphs into Cographs

Cographs from the minimal family of graphs containing K₁ which are closed with respect to complements and unions. We discuss vertex partitions of graphs into the smallest number of cographs, where the partition is as small as possible. We shall call the order of such a partition the c-chromatic number of the graph. We begin by axiomatizing several well-known graphical parameters as motivation for this function. We present several bounds on c-chromatic number in terms of well-known expressions. We show that if a graph is triangle-free, then its chromatic number is bounded between the c-chromatic number and twice this number. We show both bounds are sharp, for graphs with arbitrarily high girth. This provides an alternative proof to a result in [3]; there exist triangle-free graphs with arbitrarily large c-chromatic numbers. We show that any planar graph with girth at least 11 has a c-chromatic number of at most two. We close with several remarks on computational complexity. In particular, we show that computing the c-chromatic number is NP-complete for planar graphs.     

Coarse Differentiation and Multi-flows in Planar Graphs

We show that the multi-commodity max-flow/min-cut gap for series-parallel graphs can be as bad as 2, matching a recent upper bound (Chakrabarti et al. in 49th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science, pp. 761–770, 2008) for this class, and resolving one side of a conjecture of Gupta, Newman, Rabinovich, and Sinclair. This also improves the largest known gap for planar graphs from \frac32\frac{3}{2} to 2, yielding the first lower bound that does not follow from elementary calculations. Our approach uses the coarse differentiation method of Eskin, Fisher, and Whyte in order to lower bound the distortion for embedding a particular family of shortest-path metrics into L ₁.     

A study on oriented relative clique number

An oriented graph is a directed graph with no directed cycle of length one or two. The relative clique number of an oriented graph is the cardinality of a largest subset $X$ of vertices such that each pair of vertices is either adjacent or connected by a directed 2-path. It is known that the oriented relative clique number of a planar graph is at most 80. Here we improve the upper bound to 32. We also prove an upper bound of 14 for oriented relative clique number of triangle-free planar graphs. Furthermore, we determine the exact values of oriented relative clique number for the families of outerplanar graphs with girth at least $g$ and planar graphs with girth at least $g+2$ for all $g\ge 3$. Moreover, we study the relation of oriented relative clique number with oriented chromatic number, oriented absolute clique number and maximum degree of a graph. We also show that oriented relative clique number of a connected subcubic graph is at most seven which weakly supports a conjecture by Sopena (JGT 1997).     

New upper bounds on harmonious colorings

We present an improved upper bound on the harmonious chromatic number of an arbitrary graph. We also consider ?fragmentable”? classes of graphs (an example is the class of planar graphs) that are, roughly speaking, graphs that can be decomposed into bounded-sized components by removing a small proportion of the vertices. We show that for such graphs of bounded degree the harmonious chromatic number is close to the lower bound (2m)^1/2, where m is the number of edges.     

Matching theory and Barnette's conjecture

Barnette's Conjecture claims that all cubic, 3-connected, planar, bipartite graphs are Hamiltonian. We give a translation of this conjecture into the matching-theoretic setting. This allows us to relax the requirement of planarity to give the equivalent conjecture that all cubic, 3-connected, Pfaffian, bipartite graphs are Hamiltonian.A graph, other than the path of length three, is a brace if it is bipartite and any two disjoint edges are part of a perfect matching. Our perspective allows us to observe that Barnette's Conjecture can be reduced to cubic, planar braces. We show a similar reduction to braces for cubic, 3-connected, bipartite graphs regarding four stronger versions of Hamiltonicity. Note that in these cases we do not need planarity.As a practical application of these results, we provide some supplements to a generation procedure for cubic, 3-connected, planar, bipartite graphs discovered by Holton et al. (1985) [14]. These allow us to check whether a graph we generated is a brace.     

Injective colorings of planar graphs with few colors

An injective coloring of a graph is a vertex coloring where two vertices have distinct colors if a path of length two exists between them. In this paper some results on injective colorings of planar graphs with few colors are presented. We show that all planar graphs of girth ≥ 19 and maximum degree Δ are injectively Δ-colorable. We also show that all planar graphs of girth ≥ 10 are injectively (Δ+1)-colorable, that Δ+4 colors are sufficient for planar graphs of girth ≥ 5 if Δ is large enough, and that subcubic planar graphs of girth ≥ 7 are injectively 5-colorable.