Abstract
A ladder is a 2 × k grid graph. When does a graph class \({\cal C}\) exclude some ladder as a minor? We show that this is the case if and only if all graphs G in \({\cal C}\) 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.
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Acknowledgements
We are much grateful to the three anonymous referees for their careful reading and very helpful comments.
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T. Huynh is supported by the Australian Research Council. G. Joret is supported by an ARC grant from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation of Belgium. P. Micek was partially supported by the National Science Center of Poland under grant no. 2015/18/E/ST6/00299. M. T. Seweryn was partially supported by Kartezjusz program WND-POWR.03.02.00-00-I001/16-01 funded by The National Center for Research and Development of Poland.