Homomorphisms of signed planar graphs

Signed graphs are studied since the middle of the last century. Recently, the notion of homomorphism of signed graphs has been introduced since this notion captures a number of well known conjectures which can be reformulated using the definitions of signed homomorphism. In this paper, we introduce and study the properties of some target graphs for signed homomorphism. Using these properties, we obtain upper bounds on the signed chromatic numbers of graphs with bounded acyclic chromatic number and of signed planar graphs with given girth.