No Arabic abstract
Frame matroids and lifted-graphic matroids are two distinct minor-closed classes of matroids, each of which generalises the class of graphic matroids. The class of quasi-graphic matroids, recently introduced by Geelen, Gerards, and Whittle, simultaneously generalises both the classes of frame and lifted-graphic matroids. Let $mathcal{M}$ be one of these three classes, and let $r$ be a positive integer. We show that $mathcal{M}$ has only a finite number of excluded minors of rank $r$.
We investigate the set of excluded minors of connectivity 2 for the class of frame matroids. We exhibit a list $mathcal{E}$ of 18 such matroids, and show that if $N$ is such an excluded minor, then either $N in mathcal{E}$ or $N$ is a 2-sum of $U_{2,4}$ and a 3-connected non-binary frame matroid.
We show that the class of bicircular matroids has only a finite number of excluded minors. Key tools used in our proof include representations of matroids by biased graphs and the recently introduced class of quasi-graphic matroids. We show that if $N$ is an excluded minor of rank at least eight, then $N$ is quasi-graphic. Several small excluded minors are quasi-graphic. Using biased-graphic representations, we find that $N$ already contains one of these. We also provide an upper bound, in terms of rank, on the number of elements in an excluded minor, so the result follows.
A class of graphs is $chi$-bounded if there exists a function $f:mathbb Nrightarrow mathbb N$ such that for every graph $G$ in the class and an induced subgraph $H$ of $G$, if $H$ has no clique of size $q+1$, then the chromatic number of $H$ is less than or equal to $f(q)$. We denote by $W_n$ the wheel graph on $n+1$ vertices. We show that the class of graphs having no vertex-minor isomorphic to $W_n$ is $chi$-bounded. This generalizes several previous results; $chi$-boundedness for circle graphs, for graphs having no $W_5$ vertex-minors, and for graphs having no fan vertex-minors.
We show that for pairs $(Q,R)$ and $(S,T)$ of disjoint subsets of vertices of a graph $G$, if $G$ is sufficiently large, then there exists a vertex $v$ in $V(G)-(Qcup Rcup Scup T)$ such that there are two ways to reduce $G$ by a vertex-minor operation while preserving the connectivity between $Q$ and $R$ and the connectivity between $S$ and $T$. Our theorem implies an analogous theorem of Chen and Whittle (2014) for matroids restricted to binary matroids.
The extremal function $c(H)$ of a graph $H$ is the supremum of densities of graphs not containing $H$ as a minor, where the density of a graph $G$ is the ratio of the number of edges to the number of vertices. Myers and Thomason (2005), Norin, Reed, Thomason and Wood (2020), and Thomason and Wales (2019) determined the asymptotic behaviour of $c(H)$ for all polynomially dense graphs $H$, as well as almost all graphs $H$ of constant density. We explore the asymptotic behavior of the extremal function in the regime not covered by the above results, where in addition to having constant density the graph $H$ is in a graph class admitting strongly sublinear separators. We establish asymptotically tight bounds in many cases. For example, we prove that for every planar graph $H$, $$c(H) = (1+o(1))cdotmaxleft{frac{|V(H)|}{2},|V(H)| - alpha (H)right},$$ extending recent results of Haslegrave, Kim and Liu (2020). We also show that an asymptotically tight bound on the extremal function of graphs in minor-closed families proposed by Haslegrave, Kim and Liu (2020) is equivalent to a well studied open weakening of Hadwigers conjecture.