Related papers: Asymptotic structure. I. Coarse tree-width

In this paper, we characterise graphs that are quasi-isometric to graphs with bounded treewidth. Specifically, we prove that a graph is quasi-isometric to a graph with bounded treewidth if and only if it has a tree-decomposition where each…

When does a graph admit a tree-decomposition in which every bag has small diameter? For finite graphs, this is a property of interest in algorithmic graph theory, where it is called having bounded ``tree-length''. We will show that this is…

It is known that there is a linear dependence between the treewidth of a graph and its balanced separator number: the smallest integer $k$ such that for every weighing of the vertices, the graph admits a balanced separator of size at most…

Tree-decompositions of graphs are of fundamental importance in structural and algorithmic graph theory. The main property of tree-decompositions is the width (the maximum size of a bag minus 1). We show that every graph has a…

We prove that several natural graph classes have tree-decompositions with minimum width such that each bag has bounded treewidth. For example, every planar graph has a tree-decomposition with minimum width such that each bag has treewidth…

A classical result of Robertson and Seymour (1986) states that the treewidth of a graph is linearly tied to its separation number: the smallest integer $k$ such that, for every weighting of the vertices, the graph admits a balanced…

Quasi-isometry is a measure of how similar two graphs are at `large-scale'. Nguyen, Scott, and Seymour [arXiv:2501.09839] and Hickingbotham [arXiv:2501.10840] independently gave a characterisation of graphs quasi-isometric to graphs of…

Robertson and Seymour proved that for every finite tree $H$, there exists $k$ such that every finite graph $G$ with no $H$ minor has path-width at most $k$; and conversely, for every integer $k$, there is a finite tree $H$ such that every…

We prove that if a graph has a tree-decomposition of width at most w, then it has a tree-decomposition of width at most w with certain desirable properties. We will use this result in a subsequent paper to show that every 2-connected graph…

Cliquewidth is a dense analogue of treewidth. It can be deduced from recent results by Hickingbotham [arXiv:2501.10840] and Nguyen, Scott, and Seymour [arXiv:2501.09839] that graphs of bounded cliquewidth are quasi-isometric to graphs of…

This paper studies graphs that have two tree decompositions with the property that every bag from the first decomposition has a bounded-size intersection with every bag from the second decomposition. We show that every graph in each of the…

Two graph parameters are said to be coarsely equivalent if they are within constant factors from each other for every graph $G$. Recently, several graph parameters were shown to be coarsely equivalent to tree-length. Recall that the length…

Menger's theorem tells us that if $S,T$ are sets of vertices in a graph $G$, then (for $k\ge0$) either there are $k+1$ vertex-disjoint paths between $S$ and $T$, or there is a set of $k$ vertices separating $S$ and $T$. But what if we want…

We here investigate on the complexity of computing the \emph{tree-length} and the \emph{tree-breadth} of any graph $G$, that are respectively the best possible upper-bounds on the diameter and the radius of the bags in a tree decomposition…

In 1990, Thomas proved that every graph admits a tree decomposition of minimum width that additionally satisfies a certain vertex-connectivity condition called leanness [A Menger-like property of tree-width: The finite case. Journal of…

We show that if a graph $G$ admits a quasi-isometry $\phi$ to a graph $H$ of bounded path-width, then we can assign a non-negative integer length to each edge of $H$, such that the same function $\phi$ is a quasi-isometry to this weighted…

Diestel and M\"uller showed that the connected tree-width of a graph $G$, i.e., the minimum width of any tree-decomposition with connected parts, can be bounded in terms of the tree-width of $G$ and the largest length of a geodesic cycle in…

We show that every connected graph $G$ has a tree decomposition indexed by a tree $T$ such that $T$ is a subgraph of $G$ and the width of the tree decomposition is bounded from above by a function of the pathwidth of $G$. This answers a…

The Tree Decomposition Conjecture by Bar\'at and Thomassen states that for every tree $T$ there exists a natural number $k(T)$ such that the following holds: If $G$ is a $k(T)$-edge-connected simple graph with size divisible by the size of…

In this paper, we give a constructive proof of the fact that the treewidth of a graph is at most its divisorial gonality. The proof gives a polynomial time algorithm to construct a tree decomposition of width at most $k$, when an effective…