Graph Skeletons and Diminishing Minors

Abstract

We introduce the notion of coarse bottlenecking in graphs and coarse skeletons of graphs and show how bottlenecking guarantees that a skeleton resembles (up to quasi-isometry) the original graph. We show how these tools can be used to simplify the structure of graphs upto quasi-isometry that have an excluded asymptotic minor, reducing it to a skeleton of the original containing no $3$-fat minor. We give an example to show that a similar result does not hold for $2$-fat minors. This makes progress towards a Conjecture posed by Georgakopoulos and Papasoglu.

revised version, introduction revised to mention related work, section 3 revised, 13 pages, 3 figures