Unavoidable induced subgraphs in graphs with complete bipartite induced minors
Abstract
We prove that if a graph contains the complete bipartite graph as an induced minor, then it contains a cycle of length at most~12 or a theta as an induced subgraph. With a longer and more technical proof, we prove that if a graph contains as an induced minor, then it contains a triangle or a theta as an induced subgraph. Here, a \emph{theta} is a graph made of three internally vertex-disjoint chordless paths , , , each of length at least two, such that no edges exist between the paths except the three edges incident to and the three edges incident to . A consequence is that excluding a grid and a complete bipartite graph as induced minors is not enough to guarantee a bounded tree-independence number, or even that the treewidth is bounded by a function of the size of the maximum clique, because the existence of graphs with large treewidth that contain no triangles or thetas as induced subgraphs is already known (the so-called layered wheels).
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2405.01879,
title = {Unavoidable induced subgraphs in graphs with complete bipartite induced minors},
author = {Maria Chudnovsky and Meike Hatzel and Tuukka Korhonen and Nicolas Trotignon and Sebastian Wiederrecht},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.01879},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
26 pages, 14 figures. Statement of Lemma 5.2 slightly modified