English

Unavoidable induced subgraphs in graphs with complete bipartite induced minors

Combinatorics 2025-11-04 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

We prove that if a graph contains the complete bipartite graph K134,12K_{134, 12} 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 K3,4K_{3, 4} 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 P1=abP_1 = a \dots b, P2=abP_2 = a \dots b, P3=abP_3 = a \dots b, each of length at least two, such that no edges exist between the paths except the three edges incident to aa and the three edges incident to bb. 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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:15:10.568Z