The Local Structure Theorem for Graph Minors with finite index
Abstract
The Local Structure Theorem (LST) for Graph Minors roughly states that for every -minor-free graph that contains a sufficiently large wall , there is a small vertex subset whose removal yields a graph that admits an "almost embedding" on a surface on which does not embed. By almost embedding, we mean that there exists a hypergraph whose vertex set is a subset of the vertex set of and an embedding of on such that the drawing of each hyperedge of corresponds to a cell of the boundary of each cell intersects only the vertices of the corresponding hyperedge, and all remaining vertices and edges of are drawn in the interior of cells. The cells corresponding to hyperedges of arity at least , called vortices, are few in number and have small "depth", while "most" of the wall is disjoint from the vortices and is "grounded" in the embedding . 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 of colors assigned to the non-vortex cells exhibits "large" bidimensionality: contains a minor model of a large grid such that, for every color , the model of each vertex of contains the subgraph drawn within an -colored cell. Moreover, can be chosen in a way that is "well-connected" to the original wall .
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}
}