Strong spatial mixing for list coloring of graphs

Abstract: The property of spatial mixing and strong spatial mixing in spin systems has been of interest because of its implications on uniqueness of Gibbs measures on infinite graphs and efficient approximation of counting problems that are otherwise known to be #P hard. In the context of coloring, strong spatial mixing has been established for regular trees when $q \geq \alpha^{*} \Delta + 1$ where $q$ the number of colors, $\Delta$ is the degree and $\alpha^* = 1.763..$ is the unique solution to $xe^{-1/x} = 1$. It has also been established for bounded degree lattice graphs whenever $q \geq \alpha^* \Delta - \beta$ for some constant $\beta$, where $\Delta$ is the maximum vertex degree of the graph. The latter uses a technique based on recursively constructed coupling of Markov chains whereas the former is based on establishing decay of correlations on the tree. We establish strong spatial mixing of list colorings on arbitrary bounded degree triangle-free graphs whenever the size of the list of each vertex $v$ is at least $\alpha \Delta(v) + \beta$ where $\Delta(v)$ is the degree of vertex $v$ and $\alpha > \alpha ^*$ and $\beta$ is a constant that only depends on $\alpha$. We do this by proving the decay of correlations via recursive contraction of the distance between the marginals measured with respect to a suitably chosen error function.