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The Local Structure Theorem for Graph Minors with finite index

Combinatorics 2026-03-31 v3 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The Local Structure Theorem (LST) for Graph Minors roughly states that for every HH-minor-free graph GG that contains a sufficiently large wall WW, there is a small vertex subset A,A, whose removal yields a graph that admits an "almost embedding" δ\delta on a surface Σ\Sigma on which HH does not embed. By almost embedding, we mean that there exists a hypergraph H\mathcal{H} whose vertex set is a subset of the vertex set of GAG - A and an embedding of H\mathcal{H} on Σ\Sigma such that the drawing of each hyperedge of H\mathcal{H} corresponds to a cell of δ,\delta, the boundary of each cell intersects only the vertices of the corresponding hyperedge, and all remaining vertices and edges of GAG - A are drawn in the interior of cells. The cells corresponding to hyperedges of arity at least 44, called vortices, are few in number and have small "depth", while "most" of the wall WW is disjoint from the vortices and is "grounded" in the embedding δ\delta. Suppose that the subgraphs drawn inside each of the non-vortex cells are equipped with some finite index, i.e., each such cell is assigned a color from a finite set. We prove a version of the LST in which the set CC of colors assigned to the non-vortex cells exhibits "large" bidimensionality: GAG - A contains a minor model of a large grid Γ\Gamma such that, for every color αC\alpha \in C, the model of each vertex of Γ\Gamma contains the subgraph drawn within an α\alpha-colored cell. Moreover, Γ\Gamma can be chosen in a way that is "well-connected" to the original wall WW.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2507.02769,
  title  = {The Local Structure Theorem for Graph Minors with finite index},
  author = {Christophe Paul and Evangelos Protopapas and Dimitrios M. Thilikos and Sebastian Wiederrecht},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.02769},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T03:45:14.092Z