Obstructions to Erdős-Pósa Dualities for Minors

Abstract

Let ${\cal G}$ and ${\cal H}$ be minor-closed graph classes. The pair $({\cal H},{\cal G})$ is an Erdős-Pósa pair (EP-pair) if there is a function $f$ where, for every $k$ and every $G\in{\cal G},$ either $G$ has $k$ pairwise vertex-disjoint subgraphs not belonging to ${\cal H},$ or there is a set $S\subseteq V(G)$ where $|S|\leq f(k)$ and $G-S\in{\cal H}.$ The classic result of Erdős and Pósa says that if $\mathcal{F}$ is the class of forests, then $({\cal F},{\cal G})$ is an EP-pair for every ${\cal G}$. The class ${\cal G}$ is an EP-counterexample for ${\cal H}$ if ${\cal G}$ is minimal with the property that $({\cal H},{\cal G})$ is not an EP-pair. We prove that for every ${\cal H}$ the set $\mathfrak{C}_{\cal H}$ of all EP-counterexamples for ${\cal H}$ is finite. In particular, we provide a complete characterization of $\mathfrak{C}_{\cal H}$ for every ${\cal H}$ and give a constructive upper bound on its size. Each class ${\cal G}\in \mathfrak{C}_{\cal H}$ can be described as all minors of a sequence of grid-like graphs $\langle \mathscr{W}_{k} \rangle_{k\in \mathbb{N}}.$ Moreover, each $\mathscr{W}_{k}$ admits a half-integral packing: $k$ copies of some $H\not\in{\cal H}$ where no vertex is used more than twice. This gives a complete delineation of the half-integrality threshold of the Erdős-Pósa property for minors and yields a constructive proof of Thomas' conjecture on the half-integral Erdős-Pósa property for minors (recently confirmed, non-constructively, by Liu). Let $h$ be the maximum size of a graph in ${\cal H}.$ For every class ${\cal H},$ we construct an algorithm that, given a graph $G$ and a $k,$ either outputs a half-integral packing of $k$ copies of some $H \not\in {\cal H}$ or outputs a set of at most ${2^{k^{\cal O}_h(1)}}$ vertices whose deletion creates a graph in ${\cal H}$ in time $2^{2^{k^{{\cal O}_h(1)}}}\cdot |G|^4\log |G|.$