The -free coloring conjecture for prime non-bipartite cores
Let be a graph. A prime graph is one admitting no non-trivial decomposition with respect to the direct product, a core is a graph with no homomorphism onto a proper subgraph, and a graph is -free if it has no induced subgraph isomorphic to the path . A minimal obstruction to -coloring is a graph that does not admit a homomorphism to , while every proper subgraph does. -free coloring conjecture. If is a prime, non-bipartite core, then there is a finite family of minimal obstructions to -coloring -free graphs if and only if does not contain as a subgraph. The conjecture proposes a classification of when these minimal-obstruction families are finite; the paper notes that the corresponding behavior is already known for some odd cycles and cliques, but the general classification for prime targets remains open.
References
Primary source
Jan Goedgebeur, Jorik Jooken, Karolina Okrasa, Paweł Rzążewski and Oliver Schaudt, “Minimal obstructions to C_5-coloring in hereditary graph classes”, arXiv:2404.11704 (2026).
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