Negative results on acyclic improper colorings

Abstract

Raspaud and Sopena showed that the oriented chromatic number of a graph with acyclic chromatic number $k$ is at most $k2^{k-1}$. We prove that this bound is tight for $k \geq 3$. We also show that some improper and/or acyclic colorings are $\mathrm{NP}$-complete on a class $\mathcal{C}$ of planar graphs. We try to get the most restrictive conditions on the class $\mathcal{C}$, such as having large girth and small maximum degree. In particular, we obtain the $\mathrm{NP}$-completeness of $3$-$\mathrm{ACYCLIC \space COLORABILITY}$ on bipartite planar graphs with maximum degree $4$, and of $4$-$\mathrm{ACYCLIC \space COLORABILITY}$ on bipartite planar graphs with maximum degree $8$.