English

Faithful universal graphs for minor-closed classes

Combinatorics 2026-05-05 v4 Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

It was proved by Huynh, Mohar, \v{S}\'amal, Thomassen and Wood in 2021 that any countable graph containing every countable planar graph as a subgraph has an infinite clique minor. We prove a finite, quantitative version of this result: for fixed tt, if a graph GG is KtK_t-minor-free and contains every nn-vertex planar graph as a subgraph, then GG has 2Ω(n)2^{\Omega(n)} vertices. On the other hand, we construct a polynomial size K4K_4-minor-free graph containing every nn-vertex tree as an induced subgraph, and a polynomial size K7K_7-minor-free graph containing every nn-vertex K4K_4-minor-free graph as induced subgraph. This answers several problems raised recently by Bergold, Ir\v{s}i\v{c}, Lauff, Orthaber, Scheucher and Wesolek. We study more generally the order of universal graphs for various classes (of graphs of bounded degree, treedepth, pathwidth, or treewidth), if the universal graphs retain some of the structure of the original class.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.19582,
  title  = {Faithful universal graphs for minor-closed classes},
  author = {Paul Bastide and Louis Esperet and Carla Groenland and Claire Hilaire and Clément Rambaud and Alexandra Wesolek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.19582},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

37 pages. v4: revised version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:13:26.968Z