English

A new obstruction for normal spanning trees

Combinatorics 2020-05-11 v1

Abstract

In a paper from 2001 (Journal of the LMS), Diestel and Leader offered a proof that a connected graph has a normal spanning tree if and only if it does not contain a minor from two specific forbidden classes of graphs, all of cardinality 1\aleph_1. Unfortunately, their proof contains a gap, and their result is incorrect. In this paper, we construct a third type of obstruction: an 1\aleph_1-sized graph without a normal spanning tree that contains neither of the two types described by Diestel and Leader as a minor. Further, we show that any list of forbidden minors characterising the graphs with normal spanning trees must contain graphs of arbitrarily large cardinality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.04150,
  title  = {A new obstruction for normal spanning trees},
  author = {Max Pitz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.04150},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

9 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2005.02833

R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:24:42.303Z