English

Finding minors in graphs with a given path structure

Combinatorics 2012-07-27 v1

Abstract

Given graphs G and H with V(G) containing V(H), suppose that we have a u,v-path P_{uv} in G for each edge uv in H. There are obvious additional conditions that ensure that G contains H as a rooted subgraph, subdivision, or immersion; we seek conditions that ensure that G contains H as a rooted minor or minor. This naturally leads to studying sets of paths that form an H-immersion, with the additional property that paths that contain the same vertex must have a common endpoint. We say that HH is contractible if, whenever G contains such an H-immersion, G must also contain a rooted H-minor. We show, for example, that forests, cycles, K_4, and K_{1,1,3} are contractible, but that graphs that are not 6-colorable and graphs that contain certain subdivisions of K_{2,3} are not contractible.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1207.6141,
  title  = {Finding minors in graphs with a given path structure},
  author = {André Kündgen and Michael J. Pelsmajer and Radhika Ramamurthi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.6141},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

16 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:41:39.555Z