Linearly χ-bounding (P₆, C₄)-free graphs*

Given two graphs and , a graph is -free if it contains no induced subgraph isomorphic to or . Let and be the path on vertices and the cycle on vertices, respectively. In this paper we show that for any -free graph it holds that , where and are the chromatic number and clique number of , respectively. Our bound is attained by several graphs, for instance, the 5-cycle, the Petersen graph, the Petersen graph with an additional universal vertex, and all -critical -free graphs other than (see Hell and Huang [Discrete Appl. Math. 216 (2017), pp. 211–232]). The new result unifies previously known results on the existence of linear -binding functions for several graph classes. Our proof is based on a novel structure theorem on -free graphs that do not contain clique cutsets. Using this structure theorem we also design a polynomial time -approximation algorithm for coloring -free graphs. Our algorithm computes a coloring with colors for any -free graph in time.