A Note on Chromatic Number and Induced Odd Cycles

Abstract

An odd hole is an induced odd cycle of length at least 5. Scott and Seymour confirmed a conjecture of Gyárfás and proved that if a graph $G$ has no odd holes then $\chi(G)\le 2^{2^{\omega(G)+2}}$. Chudnovsky, Robertson, Seymour and Thomas showed that if $G$ has neither $K_4$ nor odd holes then $\chi(G)\le 4$. In this note, we show that if a graph $G$ has neither triangles nor quadrilaterals, and has no odd holes of length at least 7, then $\chi(G)\le 4$ and $\chi(G)\le 3$ if $G$ has radius at most $3$, and for each vertex $u$ of $G$, the set of vertices of the same distance to $u$ induces a bipartite subgraph. This answers some questions in Plummer and Zha (2014).