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Exact square coloring of subcubic planar graphs
Date Issued
15-04-2021
Author(s)
Foucaud, Florent
Hocquard, Hervé
Mishra, Suchismita
Narayanan, Narayanan
Naserasr, Reza
Sopena, Éric
Valicov, Petru
Abstract
We study the exact square chromatic number of subcubic planar graphs. An exact square coloring of a graph G is a vertex-coloring in which any two vertices at distance exactly 2 receive distinct colors. The smallest number of colors used in such a coloring of G is its exact square chromatic number, denoted χ[♯2](G). This notion is related to other types of distance-based colorings, as well as to injective coloring. Indeed, for triangle-free graphs, exact square coloring and injective coloring coincide. We prove tight bounds on special subclasses of planar graphs: subcubic bipartite planar graphs and subcubic K4-minor-free graphs have exact square chromatic number at most 4. We then turn our attention to the class of fullerene graphs, which are cubic planar graphs with face sizes 5 and 6. We characterize fullerene graphs with exact square chromatic number 3. Furthermore, supporting a conjecture of Chen, Hahn, Raspaud and Wang (that all subcubic planar graphs are injectively 5-colorable) we prove that any induced subgraph of a fullerene graph has exact square chromatic number at most 5. This is done by first proving that a minimum counterexample has to be on at most 80 vertices and then computationally verifying the claim for all such graphs.
Volume
293