English

Tangle structure trees II: trees of tangles and tangle-tree duality

Combinatorics 2026-03-19 v1

Abstract

Tangle structure trees, introduced in [3], offer a unified data structure that displays all the tangles of a graph or data set together with certificates for the non-existence of any other tangles, either locally or overall. In this paper we apply tangle structure trees to derive new versions of the two fundamental tangle theorems: the tree-of-tangles theorem, and the tangle-tree duality theorem. We extend the tree-of-tangles theorem to F\mathcal F-tangles that need not be profiles. When F\mathcal F consists of stars of separations, as it does in classical tangle-tree duality theorems, we show how to convert tangle structure trees that certify the non-existence of F\mathcal F-tangles into tree-decompositions that certify this in the way known from graph tangles, as SS-trees over~F\mathcal F.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.17756,
  title  = {Tangle structure trees II: trees of tangles and tangle-tree duality},
  author = {Hanno von Bergen and Reinhard Diestel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.17756},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:26:14.089Z