Star Chromatic Index
Zdenĕk Dvořák, Bojan Mohar, Robert Šámal · Journal of Graph Theory · 2012
Abstract The star chromatic index of a graph G is the minimum number of colors needed to properly color the edges of the graph so that no path or cycle of length four is bi‐colored. We obtain a near‐linear upper bound in terms of the maximum degree . Our best lower bound on in terms of Δ is valid for complete graphs. We also consider the special case of cubic graphs, for which we show that the star chromatic index lies between 4 and 7 and characterize the graphs attaining the lower bound. The proofs involve a variety of notions from other branches of mathematics and may therefore be of certain independent interest.