Motivated by an old conjecture of P. Erdős and V. Neumann-Lara, our aim is to investigate digraphs with uncountable dichromatic number and orientations of undirected graphs with uncountable chromatic number. A graph has uncountable chromatic number if its vertices cannot be covered by countably many independent sets, and a digraph has uncountable dichromatic number if its vertices cannot be covered by countably many acyclic sets. We prove that, consistently, there are digraphs with uncountable dichromatic number and arbitrarily large digirth; this is in surprising contrast with the undirected case: any graph with uncountable chromatic number contains a 4-cycle. Next, we prove that several well-known graphs (uncountable complete graphs, certain comparability graphs, and shift graphs) admit orientations with uncountable dichromatic number in ZFC. However, we show that the statement "every graph of size and chromatic number 1 has an orientation with uncountable dichromatic number" is independent of ZFC. We end the article with several open problems.
K E Y W O R D Sacyclic, chromatic number, dichromatic number, digraph, girth, orientation, partition
INTRODUCTIONThe chromatic number of an undirected graph , denoted by ( ), is the minimal number of independent sets needed to cover the vertex set of . A beautiful branch of graph theory deals with the 606