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Main Authors: Liu, Chun-Hung, Muzi, Irene
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.15822
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author Liu, Chun-Hung
Muzi, Irene
author_facet Liu, Chun-Hung
Muzi, Irene
contents Nash-Williams' Strong Immersion Conjecture states that graphs are well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation. That is, given infinitely many graphs, one graph contains another graph as a strong immersion. In this paper we study the analogous problem for directed graphs. It is known that digraphs are not well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation, but for all known such infinite antichains, paths that change direction arbitrarily many times can be found. This paper proves that the converse statement is true: for every positive integer $k$, the digraphs that do not contain a path that changes direction $k$ times are well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation, even when vertices are labelled by a well-quasi-order. This result is optimal for classes of digraphs closed under taking subgraphs since paths that change direction arbitrarily many times with vertex-labels form an infinite antichain with respect to the strong immersion relation.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2007_15822
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publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Well-quasi-ordering digraphs with no long alternating paths by the strong immersion relation
Liu, Chun-Hung
Muzi, Irene
Combinatorics
Nash-Williams' Strong Immersion Conjecture states that graphs are well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation. That is, given infinitely many graphs, one graph contains another graph as a strong immersion. In this paper we study the analogous problem for directed graphs. It is known that digraphs are not well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation, but for all known such infinite antichains, paths that change direction arbitrarily many times can be found. This paper proves that the converse statement is true: for every positive integer $k$, the digraphs that do not contain a path that changes direction $k$ times are well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation, even when vertices are labelled by a well-quasi-order. This result is optimal for classes of digraphs closed under taking subgraphs since paths that change direction arbitrarily many times with vertex-labels form an infinite antichain with respect to the strong immersion relation.
title Well-quasi-ordering digraphs with no long alternating paths by the strong immersion relation
topic Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.15822