A Note on Fractional DP-Coloring of Graphs

Abstract

DP-coloring (also called correspondence coloring) is a generalization of list coloring introduced by Dvo\v{r}\'{a}k and Postle in 2015. In 2019, Bernshteyn, Kostochka, and Zhu introduced a fractional version of DP-coloring. They showed that unlike the fractional list chromatic number, the fractional DP-chromatic number of a graph $G$, denoted $\chi_{_{DP}}^*(G)$, can be arbitrarily larger than $\chi^*(G)$, the graph's fractional chromatic number. We generalize a result of Alon, Tuza, and Voigt (1997) on the fractional list chromatic number of odd cycles, and, in the process, show that for each $k \in \mathbb{N}$, $\chi_{_{DP}}^*(C_{2k+1}) = \chi^*(C_{2k+1})$. We also show that for any $n \geq 2$ and $m \in \mathbb{N}$, if $p^*$ is the solution in $(0,1)$ to $p=(1-p)^n$ then $\chi_{_{DP}}^*(K_{n,m})\leq1/p^*$, and we prove a generalization of this result for multipartite graphs. Finally, we determine a lower bound on $\chi_{_{DP}}^*(K_{2,m})$ for any $m \geq 3$.