Complete directed minors and chromatic number


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Date

2022

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

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Abstract

The dichromatic number $\overrightarrow{\chi }(D)$ of a digraph $D$ is the smallest $k$ for which it admits a $k$-coloring where every color class induces an acyclic subgraph. Inspired by Hadwiger's conjecture for undirected graphs, several groups of authors have recently studied the containment of complete directed minors in digraphs with a given dichromatic number. In this note we exhibit a relation of these problems to Hadwiger's conjecture. Exploiting this relation, we show that every directed graph excluding the complete digraph ${\overleftrightarrow{K}}_{t}$ of order $t$ as a strong minor or as a butterfly minor is $O(t{(\mathrm{log}\unicode{x0200A}\mathrm{log}\unicode{x0200A}t)}^{6})$-colorable. This answers a question by Axenovich, Girao, Snyder, and Weber, who proved an upper bound of $t{4}<^>{t}$ for the same problem. A further consequence of our results is that every digraph of dichromatic number $22n$ contains a subdivision of every $n$-vertex subcubic digraph, which makes progress on a set of problems raised by Aboulker, Cohen, Havet, Lochet, Moura, and Thomasse.

Publication status

published

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Book title

Volume

101 (4)

Pages / Article No.

623 - 632

Publisher

Wiley

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

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Date collected

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Subject

chromatic number; directed graphs; graph minors; Hadwiger's conjecture

Organisational unit

03672 - Steger, Angelika / Steger, Angelika check_circle

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