Uniform Mixed Hypergraphs: The Possible Numbers of Colors

For a mixed hypergraph , where and are set systems over the vertex set X, a coloring is a partition of X into ‘color classes’ such that every meets some class in more than one vertex, and every has a nonempty intersection with at least two classes. The feasible set of , denoted , is the set of integers k such that admits a coloring with precisely k nonempty color classes. It was proved by Jiang et al. Graphs and Combinatorics 18 (2002), 309–318] that a set S of natural numbers is the feasible set of some mixed hypergraph if and only if either or S is an ‘interval’ for some integer k ≥ 1. In this note we consider r-uniform mixed hypergraphs, i.e. those with |C| = |D| = r for all and all , r ≥ 3. We prove that S is the feasible set of some r-uniform mixed hypergraph with at least one edge if and only if either for some natural number k ≥ r − 1, or S is of the form where S′′ is any (possibly empty) subset of and S′ is either the empty set or {r − 1} or an ‘interval’ {k, k + 1, ..., r − 1} for some k, 2 ≤ k ≤ r − 2. We also prove that all these feasible sets can be obtained under the restriction , i.e. within the class of ‘bi-hypergraphs’. Research supported in part by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, OTKA grant T-049613.