Excluding a ladder

TL;DR

This paper characterizes when a graph class excludes a ladder as a minor through a special vertex coloring condition and explores structural properties related to graph minors, with applications to poset dimension.

Contribution

It introduces a new coloring-based characterization for excluding a ladder minor and connects this to graph structure and poset dimension bounds.

Findings

Graph classes excluding a ladder as a minor admit bounded-colorings with specific properties.

3-connected graphs with certain minors contain larger grid minors.

Posets with cover graphs excluding a ladder minor have bounded dimension.

Abstract

A ladder is a $2 \times k$ grid graph. When does a graph class $\mathcal{C}$ exclude some ladder as a minor? We show that this is the case if and only if all graphs $G$ in $\mathcal{C}$ 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 $2 \times k$ grid has a $2 \times (k+1)$ 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.