List Coloring Hypergraphs

Abstract

Let $H$ be a hypergraph and let $L_v : v \in V(H)$ be sets; we refer to these sets as lists and their elements as colors. A list coloring of $H$ is an assignment of a color from $L_v$ to each $v \in V(H)$ in such a way that every edge of $H$ contains a pair of vertices of different colors. The hypergraph $H$ is $k$-list-colorable if it has a list coloring from any collection of lists of size $k$. The list chromatic number of $H$ is the minimum $k$ such that $H$ is $k$-list-colorable. In this paper we prove that every $d$-regular three-uniform linear hypergraph has list chromatic number at least $(\frac{\log d}{5\log \log d})^{1/2}$ provided $d$ is large enough. On the other hand there exist $d$-regular three-uniform linear hypergraphs with list chromatic number at most $\log_3 d+3$. This leaves the question open as to the existence of such hypergraphs with list chromatic number $o(\log d)$ as $d \rightarrow \infty$.