Local Weak Degeneracy of Planar Graphs

Abstract

Thomassen showed that planar graphs are 5-list-colourable, and that planar graphs of girth at least five are 3-list-colourable. An easy degeneracy argument shows that planar graphs of girth at least four are 4-list-colourable. In 2022, Postle and Smith-Roberge proved a common strengthening of these three results: with $g(v)$ denoting the length of a shortest cycle containing a vertex $v$, they showed that if $G$ is a planar graph and $L$ a list assignment for $G$ where $|L(v)| \geq \max\{3,8-g(v)\}$ for all $v \in V(G)$, then $G$ is $L$-colourable. Moreover, they conjectured that an analogous theorem should hold for correspondence colouring. We prove this conjecture; in fact, our main theorem holds in the still more restrictive setting of weak degeneracy, and moreover acts as a joint strengthening of the fact that planar graphs are weakly 4-degenerate (originally due to Bernshteyn, Lee, and Smith-Roberge), and that planar graphs of girth at least five are weakly 2-degenerate (originally due to Han et al.).