Vertex-distinguishing and sum-distinguishing edge coloring of regular graphs

Series
Graph Theory Seminar
Time
Tuesday, April 14, 2026 - 3:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Songling Shan – Auburn University
Organizer
Rose McCarty and Xiying Du

Given an integer $k\ge1$, an edge-$k$-coloring of a graph $G$ is an assignment of $k$ colors $1,\ldots,k$ to the edges of $G$ such that no two adjacent edges receive the same color. A vertex-distinguishing (resp. sum-distinguishing) edge-$k$-coloring of $G$ is an edge-$k$-coloring such that for any two distinct vertices $u$ and $v$, the set (resp. sum) of colors taken from all the edges incident with $u$ is different from that taken from all the edges incident with $v$. The vertex-distinguishing chromatic index (resp. sum-distinguishing chromatic index), denoted $\chi'_{vd}(G)$ (resp.  $\chi'_{sd}(G)$), is the smallest value $k$ such that $G$ has a vertex-distinguishing edge-$k$-coloring (resp. sum-distinguishing edge-$k$-coloring). Let $G$ be a   $d$-regular graph on $n$ vertices, where $n$ is even and sufficiently large. We show that $\chi'_{vd}(G) =d+2$ if $d$ is arbitrarily close to $n/2$ from above, and $\chi'_{sd}(G) =d+2$ if $d\ge \frac{2n}{3}$. 


This is joint work with Yuping Gao and Guanghui Wang.