Acyclic colorings of graph subdivisions

Abstract

An acyclic coloring of a graph G is a coloring of the vertices of G, where no two adjacent vertices of G receive the same color and no cycle of G is bichromatic. An acyclic k-coloring of G is an acyclic coloring of G using at most k colors. In this paper we prove that any triangulated plane graph G with n vertices has a subdivision that is acyclically 4-colorable, where the number of division vertices is at most 2n - 6. We show that it is NP-complete to decide whether a graph with degree at most 7 is acyclically 4-colorable or not. Furthermore, we give some sufficient conditions on the number of division vertices for acyclic 3-coloring of subdivisions of partial k-trees and cubic graphs. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.