Well-quasi-ordering digraphs with no long alternating paths by the strong immersion relation

Abstract

Nash-Williams' Strong Immersion Conjecture states that graphs are well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation. That is, given infinitely many graphs, one graph contains another graph as a strong immersion. In this paper we study the analogous problem for directed graphs. It is known that digraphs are not well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation, but for all known such infinite antichains, paths that change direction arbitrarily many times can be found. This paper proves that the converse statement is true: for every positive integer k, the digraphs that do not contain a path that changes direction k times are well-quasi-ordered by the strong immersion relation, even when vertices are labeled by a well-quasi-order. This result is optimal for classes of digraphs closed under taking subgraphs since paths that change direction arbitrarily many times with vertex-labels form an infinite antichain with respect to the strong immersion relation.