Chromatic numbers of flag 3-spheres

Abstract

A recent conjecture of Chudnovsky and Nevo asserts that flag triangulations of spheres always have linear-sized independent sets, with a precisely conjectured proportion depending on the dimension. For dimensions one and two, the lower bound of their conjecture basically follow from constant bounds on the chromatic number of flag triangulations of $S^1$ and $S^2$. This raises a natural question that does not appear to have been considered: For each $d$ is there a constant upper bound for the chromatic number of flag triangulations of $S^d$? Here we show that the answer to this question is no, and use results from Ramsey theory to construct flag triangulations of 3-spheres on $n$ vertices with chromatic number at least $\widetilde{\Omega}(n^{1/4})$.