Edge-ends versus topological ends of graphs

Abstract

Diestel and Kühn proved that the topological ends of an infinite graph are precisely its undominated graph ends, yielding a canonical embedding of the space of topological ends into the space of graph ends. For edge-ends, introduced by Hahn, Laviolette and Širáň, such an embedding does not exist in general. In this note, we characterize the class of infinite graphs for which the topological ends admit a natural injective map into the space of edge-ends that is compatible with the canonical maps between end spaces. Our characterization is purely combinatorial and is expressed in terms of edge-equivalence classes of vertices. Moreover, when such an embedding exists, we identify precisely which edge-ends arise from topological ends, showing that they are exactly the edge-ends containing a non-dominated ray. This establishes a parallel result to the theorem of Diestel and Kühn for edge-end spaces.