English

Bottlenecking in graphs and a coarse Menger-type theorem

Metric Geometry 2024-10-23 v3 Combinatorics

Abstract

We expand upon the notion of bottlenecking introduced in our earlier work, characterizing a spectrum of graphs and showing that this naturally extends to a concept of coarse bottlenecking. We show how the notion of bottlenecking provides a different approach to coarsening measures of connectedness than the Coarse Menger Conjecture proposed independently by Georgakopoulos and Papasoglu as well as Albrechtsen, Huynh, Jacobs, Knappe, and Wollan - which was recently disproved by a counterexample. We formulate and prove a Coarse Menger-type theorem, and also propose a coarse Erd\H{o}s-Menger-type Conjecture, in the spirit of the Erd\H{o}s-Menger conjecture which was proven after decades by Aharoni and Berger.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.07802,
  title  = {Bottlenecking in graphs and a coarse Menger-type theorem},
  author = {Michael Bruner and Atish Mitra and Heidi Steiger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.07802},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

revised version, introduction completely rewritten, section 2 and 3 merged, section 5 substantially modified, 13 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:02:28.889Z