The Chromatic Number of $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ with Multiple Forbidden Distances

TL;DR

This paper investigates the chromatic number of Euclidean space when multiple distances are forbidden, providing improved lower bounds and generalizations for coloring problems related to finite sets of distances.

Contribution

It advances the understanding of Euclidean space coloring by establishing new lower bounds for multiple distances and extending results to clique colorings using the Partition Rank Method.

Findings

Established a lower bound of ig( ext{constant} imes \sqrt{m+1}ig)^n for the m-distance chromatic number.

Generalized results to clique colorings with bounds depending on clique size k.

Applied the Partition Rank Method to derive these bounds.

Abstract

Let $A\subset\mathbb{R}_{>0}$ be a finite set of distances, and let $G_{A}(\mathbb{R}^{n})$ be the graph with vertex set $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and edge set $\{(x,y)\in\mathbb{R}^{n}:\ \|x-y\|_{2}\in A\}$, and let $\chi(\mathbb{R}^{n},A)=\chi\left(G_{A}(\mathbb{R}^{n})\right)$. Erd\H{o}s asked about the growth rate of the $m$-distance chromatic number \[ \bar{\chi}(\mathbb{R}^{n};m)=\max_{|A|=m}\chi(\mathbb{R}^{n},A). \] We improve the best existing lower bound for $\bar{\chi}(\mathbb{R}^{n};m)$, and show that \[ \bar{\chi}(\mathbb{R}^{n};m)\geq\left(\Gamma_{\chi}\sqrt{m+1}+o(1)\right)^{n} \] where $\Gamma_{\chi}=0.79983\dots$ is an explicit constant. Our full result is more general, and applies to cliques in this graph. Let $\chi_{k}(G)$ denote the minimum number of colors needed to color $G$ so that no color contains a $(k+1)$-clique, and let $\bar{\chi}_{k}(\mathbb{R}^{n};m)$ denote the largest value this takes for any distance set of size $m$ . Using the Partition Rank Method, we show that \[ \bar{\chi}_{k}(\mathbb{R}^{n};m)>\left(\Gamma_{\chi}\sqrt{\frac{m+1}{k}}+o(1)\right)^{n}. \]