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Excluding a ladder

par Huynh, Tony ;Joret, Gwenaël ;Micek, Piotr;Seweryn, Michal;Wollan, Paul
Référence Combinatorica, 42, page (405-432)
Publication Publié, 2022-01-01

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

A ladder is a 2 × k grid graph. When does a graph class C exclude some ladder as a minor? We show that this is the case if and only if all graphs G in C admit a proper vertex coloring with a bounded number of colors such that for every 2-connected subgraph H of G, there is a color that appears exactly once in H. This type of vertex coloring is a relaxation of the notion of centered coloring, where for every connected subgraph H of G, there must be a color that appears exactly once in H. The minimum number of colors in a centered coloring of G is the treedepth of G, and it is known that classes of graphs with bounded treedepth are exactly those that exclude a fixed path as a subgraph, or equivalently, as a minor. In this sense, the structure of graphs excluding a fixed ladder as a minor resembles the structure of graphs without long paths. Another similarity is as follows: It is an easy observation that every connected graph with two vertex-disjoint paths of length k has a path of length k+1. We show that every 3-connected graph which contains as a minor a union of sufficiently many vertex-disjoint copies of a 2×k grid has a 2×(k+1) grid minor. Our structural results have applications to poset dimension. We show that posets whose cover graphs exclude a fixed ladder as a minor have bounded dimension. This is a new step towards the goal of understanding which graphs are unavoidable as minors in cover graphs of posets with large dimension.