List injective edge-coloring of subcubic graphs (Q2043370)

The authors consider a recently introduced notion of edge-colouring of graphs, namely injective edge-colouring, where two edges must be assigned distinct colours if they are the end-edges of a 3-edge path or if they belong to a common triangle. (Note that incident edges could receive the same colour.) The injective chromatic index of a graph is the smallest number of colours needed in such a colouring. More specifically, this short note is concerned with the list version of the injective chromatic index -- for which each edge takes some arbitrary list of assignable colours -- and show that it is bounded by \(7\) for graphs of maximum degree \(3\). Most of the proof is a case analysis to reduce the problem to the Petersen graph, which is then handled with combinatorial Nullstellensatz and a computer check. They conjecture that their bound can be reduced from \(7\) to \(6\), which would be sharp if true.