Notes on Tree- and Path-chromatic Number

Abstract

Tree-chromatic number is a chromatic version of treewidth, where the cost of a bag in a tree-decomposition is measured by its chromatic number rather than its size. Path-chromatic number is defined analogously. These parameters were introduced by Seymour (JCTB 2016). In this paper, we survey all the known results on tree- and path-chromatic number and then present some new results and conjectures. In particular, we propose a version of Hadwiger's Conjecture for tree-chromatic number. As evidence that our conjecture may be more tractable than Hadwiger's Conjecture, we give a short proof that every \(K_5\)-minor-free graph has tree-chromatic number at most \(4\), which avoids the Four Colour Theorem. We also present some hardness results and conjectures for computing tree- and path-chromatic number.