Induced Cycles of Many Lengths

Abstract

Let $G$ be a graph and let $\mathrm{cl}(G)$ be the number of distinct induced cycle lengths in $G$. We show that for $c,t\in \mathbb N$, every graph $G$ that does not contain an induced subgraph isomorphic to $K_{t+1}$ or $K_{t,t}$ and satisfies $\mathrm{cl}(G) \le c$ has bounded treewidth. As a consequence, we obtain a polynomial-time algorithm for deciding whether a graph $G$ contains induced cycles of at least three distinct lengths.