Acyclic coloring of graphs of maximum degree five: Nine colors are enough

An acyclic coloring of a graph G is a coloring of its vertices such that: (i) no two neighbors in G are assigned the same color and (ii) no bicolored cycle can exist in G. The acyclic chromatic number of G is the least number of colors necessary to acyclically color G. In this paper, we show that any graph of maximum degree 5 has acyclic chromatic number at most 9, and we give a linear time algorithm that achieves this bound.