Coarse Menger property of quasi-minor excluded graphs and length spaces

TL;DR

This paper proves that locally finite graphs with an excluded finite minor satisfy a coarse Menger property, extending to related length spaces, with optimal functions controlling path separation and covering.

Contribution

It establishes the coarse Menger property for minor-excluded graphs and related length spaces, with explicit optimal functions depending on the parameters.

Findings

Locally finite graphs with excluded minors satisfy the coarse Menger property.

The functions controlling the property are optimal up to a constant factor.

The result extends to various length spaces quasi-isometric to such graphs.

Abstract

Menger's theorem is an important building block of numerous results in the study of graph structure. We consider a variant in terms of coarse geometry. We say that a set of graphs has the weak coarse Menger property if there exist functions $f$ and $g$ such that for any graph $G$ in this set, subsets $X$ and $Y$ of vertices of $G$, and positive integers $k$ and $r$, either there exist $k$ paths between $X$ and $Y$ pairwise at distance at least $r$, or there exists a union of at most $f(k,r)$ balls of radius at most $g(k,r)$ intersecting all paths between $X$ and $Y$. Nguyen, Scott and Seymour proved that the set of all graphs does not have the weak coarse Menger property and asked whether every proper minor-closed family of finite graphs has it. In this paper, we provide a positive answer to this question in a stronger form: it is true for the set of locally finite graphs with an excluded finite minor, and the functions $f$ and $g$ can be chosen so that $f$ only depends on the number $k$ of the paths in the packing and the function $g$ is a linear function of the distance threshold $r$ and is independent of $k$, which is optimal up to a constant factor. Our result extends to every length space quasi-isometric to a locally finite graph or metric graph with an excluded finite minor, such as complete Riemannian surfaces of finite Euler genus, string graphs, and Cayley graphs of finitely generated minor-excluded groups.