Towards tight(er) bounds for the Excluded Grid Theorem

Abstract

We study the Excluded Grid Theorem, a fundamental structural result in graph theory, that was proved by Robertson and Seymour in their seminal work on graph minors. The theorem states that there is a function f:Z+→Z+, such that for every integer g>0, every graph of treewidth at least f(g) contains the (g×g)-grid as a minor. For every integer g>0, let f(g) be the smallest value for which the theorem holds. Establishing tight bounds on f(g) is an important graph-theoretic question. Robertson and Seymour showed that f(g)=Ω(g2log⁡g) must hold. For a long time, the best known upper bounds on f(g) were super-exponential in g. The first polynomial upper bound of f(g)=O(g98polylog⁡g) was proved by Chekuri and Chuzhoy. It was later improved to f(g)=O(g36polylog⁡g), and then to f(g)=O(g19polylog⁡g). In this paper we further improve this bound to f(g)=O(g9polylog⁡g). We believe that our proof is significantly simpler than the proofs of the previous bounds. Moreover, while there are natural barriers that seem to prevent previous methods from yielding tight bounds for the theorem, it seems conceivable that the techniques proposed in this paper can lead to even tighter bounds on f(g).