Simplicial minors and decompositions of graphs

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to give natural characterizations of the countable graphs that admit tree-decompositions or simplicial tree-decompositions into primes. Tree-decompositions were recently introduced by Robertson and Seymour in their series of papers on graph minors [7]. Simplicial tree-decompositions were first considered by Halin[6], being the most typical kind of ‘simplicial decomposition’ as introduced by Halin[5] in 1964. The problem of determining which infinite graphs admit a simplicial decomposition into primes has stood unresolved since then; a first solution for simplicial tree-decompositions was given in [2].