Tangle structure trees
Abstract
We introduce a comprehensive data structure, tangle structure trees, which simultaneously displays all the -tangles of an abstract separation system for very general obstruction sets . It simultaneously also displays certificates 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 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/