Twin-width of graphs on surfaces

07/11/2023

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by   Daniel Kral, et al.

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Twin-width is a width parameter introduced by Bonnet, Kim, Thomassé and Watrigant [FOCS'20, JACM'22], which has many structural and algorithmic applications. We prove that the twin-width of every graph embeddable in a surface of Euler genus g is 18√(47g)+O(1), which is asymptotically best possible as it asymptotically differs from the lower bound by a constant multiplicative factor. Our proof also yields a quadratic time algorithm to find a corresponding contraction sequence. To prove the upper bound on twin-width of graphs embeddable in surfaces, we provide a stronger version of the Product Structure Theorem for graphs of Euler genus g that asserts that every such graph is a subgraph of the strong product of a path and a graph with a tree-decomposition with all bags of size at most eight with a single exceptional bag of size max{8,32g-27}.