On uniquely 3-colorable plane graphs without prescribed adjacent faces

Abstract: A graph $G$ is \emph{uniquely k-colorable} if the chromatic number of $G$ is $k$ and $G$ has only one $k$-coloring up to permutation of the colors. For a plane graph $G$, two faces $f_1$ and $f_2$ of $G$ are \emph{adjacent $(i,j)$-faces} if $d(f_1)=i$, $d(f_2)=j$ and $f_1$ and $f_2$ have a common edge, where $d(f)$ is the degree of a face $f$. In this paper, we prove that every uniquely 3-colorable plane graph has adjacent $(3,k)$-faces, where $k\leq 5$. The bound 5 for $k$ is best possible. Furthermore, we prove that there exist a class of uniquely 3-colorable plane graphs having neither adjacent $(3,i)$-faces nor adjacent $(3,j)$-faces, where $i,j\in {3,4,5}$ and $i \neq j$. One of our constructions implies that there exist an infinite family of edge-critical uniquely 3-colorable plane graphs with $n$ vertices and $\frac{7}{3}n-\frac{14}{3}$ edges, where $n(\geq 11)$ is odd and $n\equiv 2\pmod{3}$.