English

Constant congestion brambles in directed graphs

Combinatorics 2026-02-19 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The Directed Grid Theorem, stating that there is a function ff such that a directed graphs of directed treewidth at least f(k)f(k) contains a directed grid of size at least kk as a butterfly minor, after being a conjecture for nearly 20 years, has been proven in 2015 by Kawarabayashi and Kreutzer. However, the function ff obtained in the proof is very fast growing. In this work, we show that if one relaxes directed grid to bramble of constant congestion, one can obtain a polynomial bound. More precisely, we show that for every k1k \geq 1 there exists t=O(k48log13k)t = \mathcal{O}(k^{48} \log^{13} k) such that every directed graph of directed treewidth at least tt contains a bramble of congestion at most 88 and size at least kk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2103.08445,
  title  = {Constant congestion brambles in directed graphs},
  author = {Tomáš Masařík and Marcin Pilipczuk and Paweł Rzążewski and Manuel Sorge},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.08445},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

16 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T00:10:47.526Z