A construction of uniquely \(n\)-colorable digraphs with arbitrarily large digirth

Michael Severino¹

¹Flathead Valley Community College

The electronic journal of combinatorics, Tome 24 (2017) no. 2

Résumé

A natural digraph analogue of the graph-theoretic concept of an `independent set' is that of an `acyclic set', namely a set of vertices not spanning a directed cycle. Hence a digraph analogue of a graph coloring is a decomposition of the vertex set into acyclic sets and we say a digraph is uniquely $n$-colorable when this decomposition is unique up to relabeling. It was shown probabilistically in [A. Harutyunyan et al., Uniquely $D$-colorable digraphs with large girth, Canad. J. Math., 64(6): 1310-1328, 2012] that there exist uniquely $n$-colorable digraphs with arbitrarily large girth. Here we give a construction of such digraphs and prove that they have circular chromatic number $n$. The graph-theoretic notion of `homomorphism' also gives rise to a digraph analogue. An acyclic homomorphism from a digraph $D$ to a digraph $H$ is a mapping $\varphi: V(D) \rightarrow V(H)$ such that $uv \in A(D)$ implies that either $\varphi(u)\varphi(v) \in A(H)$ or $\varphi(u)=\varphi(v)$, and all the `fibers' $\varphi^{-1}(v)$, for $v \in V(H)$, of $\varphi$ are acyclic. In this language, a core is a digraph $D$ for which there does not exist an acyclic homomorphism from $D$ to a proper subdigraph of itself. Here we prove some basic results about digraph cores and construct highly chromatic cores without short cycles.

Détail

DOI : 10.37236/4823

Classification : 05C20, 05C15, 05C69
Mots-clés : digraph, chromatic number, acyclic homomorphism, girth