Counting colorings of a regular graph

Abstract

At most how many (proper) q-colorings does a regular graph admit? Galvin and Tetali conjectured that among all n-vertex, d-regular graphs with 2d|n, none admits more q-colorings than the disjoint union of n/2d copies of the complete bipartite graph K_{d,d}. In this note we give asymptotic evidence for this conjecture, giving an upper bound on the number of proper q-colorings admitted by an n-vertex, d-regular graph of the form a^n b^{n(1+o(1))/d} (where a and b depend on q and where o(1) goes to 0 as d goes to infinity) that agrees up to the o(1) term with the count of q-colorings of n/2d copies of K_{d,d}. An auxiliary result is an upper bound on the number of colorings of a regular graph in terms of its independence number. For example, we show that for all even q and fixed \epsilon > 0 there is \delta=\delta(\epsilon,q) such that the number of proper q-colorings admitted by an n-vertex, d-regular graph with no independent set of size n(1-\epsilon)/2 is at most (a-\delta)^n.