Colourings of oriented connected cubic graphs

Abstract

In this note we show every orientation of a connected cubic graph admits an oriented 8-colouring. This lowers the best-known upper bound for the chromatic number of the family of orientations of connected cubic graphs. We further show that every such oriented graph admits a 2-dipath 7-colouring. These results imply that either the oriented chromatic number for the family of orientations of connected cubic graphs equals the 2-dipath chromatic number or the long-standing conjecture of Sopena (Sopena, 1997) regarding the chromatic number of orientations of connected cubic graphs is false.