Minimal Obstructions to C₅-Coloring in Hereditary Graph Classes

For graphs G and H, an H-coloring of G is an edge-preserving mapping from V(G) to V(H). Note that if H is the triangle, then H-colorings are equivalent to 3-colorings. In this paper we are interested in the case that H is the five-vertex cycle C₅. A minimal obstruction to C₅-coloring is a graph that does not have a C₅-coloring, but every proper induced subgraph thereof has a C₅-coloring. In this paper we are interested in minimal obstructions to C₅-coloring in F-free graphs, i.e., graphs that exclude some fixed graph F as an induced subgraph. Let P_t denote the path on t vertices, and let S_{a,b,c} denote the graph obtained from paths P_{a+1},P_{b+1},P_{c+1} by identifying one of their endvertices. We show that there is only a finite number of minimal obstructions to C₅-coloring among F-free graphs, where F ∈ {P₈, S_{2,2,1}, S_{3,1,1}} and explicitly determine all such obstructions. This extends the results of Kamiński and Pstrucha [Discr. Appl. Math. 261, 2019] who proved that there is only a finite number of P₇-free minimal obstructions to C₅-coloring, and of Dębski et al. [ISAAC 2022 Proc.] who showed that the triangle is the unique S_{2,1,1}-free minimal obstruction to C₅-coloring. We complement our results with a construction of an infinite family of minimal obstructions to C₅-coloring, which are simultaneously P_{13}-free and S_{2,2,2}-free. We also discuss infinite families of F-free minimal obstructions to H-coloring for other graphs H.