Equitable colorings of planar graphs without short cycles

Abstract

An equitable coloring of a graph is a proper vertex coloring such that the sizes of every two color classes differ by at most 1. Chen, Lih, and Wu conjectured that every connected graph G with maximum degree Δ≥2 has an equitable coloring with Δ colors, except when G is a complete graph or an odd cycle or Δ is odd and G=KΔ,Δ. Nakprasit proved that the conjecture holds for planar graphs with maximum degree at least 9. Zhu and Bu proved that the conjecture holds for every C3-free planar graph with maximum degree at least 8 and for every planar graph without C4 and C5 with maximum degree at least 7.In this paper, we prove that the conjecture holds for planar graphs in various settings, especially for every C3-free planar graph with maximum degree at least 6 and for every planar graph without C4 with maximum degree at least 7; this improves or generalizes results on equitable coloring by Zhu and Bu. Moreover, we prove that the conjecture holds for every planar graph of girth at least 6 with maximum degree at least 5.