Coloring complexes and arrangements

Steingrimsson’s coloring complex and Jonsson’s unipolar complex are interpreted in terms of hyperplane arrangements. This viewpoint leads to short proofs that all coloring complexes and a large class of unipolar complexes have convex ear decompositions. These convex ear decompositions impose strong new restrictions on the chromatic polynomials of all finite graphs. Similar results are obtained for characteristic polynomials of submatroids of type ℬ _n arrangements. The first author was supported by NSF grant DMS-0500638. The second author was supported by NSF grant DMS-0245623.