Orientations of graphs with uncountable chromatic number

Motivated by an old conjecture of P. Erds and V. Neumann-Lara, our aim is to investigate digraphs with uncountable dichromatic number and orientations of undirected graphs with uncountable chromatic number. A graph has uncountable chromatic number if its vertices cannot be covered by countably many independent sets, and a digraph has uncountable dichromatic number if its vertices cannot be covered by countably many acyclic sets. We prove that, consistently, there are digraphs with uncountable dichromatic number and arbitrarily large digirth; this is in surprising contrast with the undirected case: any graph with uncountable chromatic number contains a 4-cycle. Next, we prove that several well-known graphs (uncountable complete graphs, certain comparability graphs, and shift graphs) admit orientations with uncountable dichromatic number in ZFC. However, we show that the statement every graph G of size and chromatic number (1) has an orientation D with uncountable dichromatic number is independent of ZFC. We end the article with several open problems.