English

Tangle structure trees

Combinatorics 2026-03-23 v2

Abstract

We introduce a comprehensive data structure, tangle structure trees, which simultaneously displays all the F\mathcal{F}-tangles of an abstract separation system for very general obstruction sets F\mathcal{F}. It simultaneously also displays certificates σF\sigma\in\mathcal{F} for any non-existence of such tangles, or for the non-extendability of low-order tangles to higher-order ones. Our theorem can be applied to produce the structures of the classical tree-of-tangles and tangle-tree duality theorems, both for graph tangles and for their known generalizations to more general separation systems. It extends those theorems to obstruction sets F\mathcal{F} that need not define profiles (as they must in all known trees of tangles) or consist of stars of separations (as they must in traditional tangle-tree duality). Our existence proof for these structure trees is constructive. The construction has been implemented in open-source software available for tangle detection and further analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.15870,
  title  = {Tangle structure trees},
  author = {Hanno von Bergen and Reinhard Diestel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.15870},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accompanying software available from https://www.tangles-book.com/software/