The chromatic number of triangle-free hypergraphs

TL;DR

This paper generalizes and sharpens bounds on the chromatic number of triangle-free hypergraphs of any rank, extending classical results from graphs and rank 3 hypergraphs to all hypergraphs, with new proof techniques.

Contribution

It provides a unified bound on the list chromatic number for all triangle-free hypergraphs of any rank, improving and extending previous results.

Findings

Bound on list chromatic number for all triangle-free hypergraphs.

Generalization of Johansson's and Cooper-Mubayi's theorems.

Alternative proof approach for hypergraph coloring bounds.

Abstract

A triangle in a hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ is a set of three distinct edges $e, f, g\in\mathcal{H}$ and three distinct vertices $u, v, w\in V(\mathcal{H})$ such that $\{u, v\}\subseteq e$, $\{v, w\}\subseteq f$, $\{w, u\}\subseteq g$ and $\{u, v, w\}\cap e\cap f\cap g=\emptyset$. Johansson proved in 1996 that $\chi(G)=\mathcal{O}(\Delta/\log\Delta)$ for any triangle-free graph $G$ with maximum degree $\Delta$. Cooper and Mubayi later generalized the Johansson's theorem to all rank $3$ hypergraphs. In this paper we provide a common generalization of both these results for all hypergraphs, showing that if $\mathcal{H}$ is a rank $k$, triangle-free hypergraph, then the list chromatic number \[ \chi_{\ell}(\mathcal{H})\leq \mathcal{O}\left(\max_{2\leq \ell \leq k} \left\{\left( \frac{\Delta_{\ell}}{\log \Delta_{\ell}} \right)^{\frac{1}{\ell-1}} \right\}\right), \] where $\Delta_{\ell}$ is the maximum $\ell$-degree of $\mathcal{H}$. The result is sharp apart from the constant. Moreover, our result implies, generalizes and improves several earlier results on the chromatic number and also independence number of hypergraphs, while its proof is based on a different approach than prior works in hypergraphs (and therefore provides alternative proofs to them). In particular, as an application, we establish a bound on chromatic number of sparse hypergraphs in which each vertex is contained in few triangles, and thus extend results of Alon, Krivelevich and Sudakov, and Cooper and Mubayi from hypergraphs of rank 2 and 3, respectively, to all hypergraphs.