In a paper from 2001 (Journal of the LMS), Diestel and Leader offered a proof that a connected graph has a normal spanning tree if and only if it does not contain a minor from two specific forbidden classes of graphs, all of cardinality $\aleph_1$. Unfortunately, their proof contains a gap, and their result is incorrect. In this paper, we construct a third type of obstruction: an $\aleph_1$-sized graph without a normal spanning tree that contains neither of the two types described by Diestel and Leader as a minor. Further, we show that any list of forbidden minors characterising the graphs with normal spanning trees must contain graphs of arbitrarily large cardinality.
Diestel and Leader have characterised connected graphs that admit a normal spanning tree via two classes of forbidden minors. One class are Halin's $(\aleph_0,\aleph_1)$-graphs: bipartite graphs with bipartition $(\mathbb{N},B)$ such that $B$ is uncountable and every vertex of $B$ has infinite degree. Our main result is that under Martin's Axiom and the failure of the Continuum Hypothesis, the class of forbidden $(\aleph_0,\aleph_1)$-graphs in Diestel and Leader's result can be replaced by one single instance of such a graph. Under CH, however, the class of $(\aleph_0,\aleph_1)$-graphs contain…
Halin conjectured 20 years ago that a graph has a normal spanning tree if and only if every minor of it has countable colouring number. We prove Halin's conjecture. This implies a forbidden minor characterisation for the property of having a normal spanning tree.
Schmidt characterised the class of rayless graphs by an ordinal rank function, which makes it possible to prove statements about rayless graphs by transfinite induction. Halin asked whether Schmidt's rank function can be generalised to characterise other important classes of graphs. We answer Halin's question in the affirmative. Another largely open problem raised by Halin asks for a characterisation of the class of graphs with an end-faithful spanning tree. A well-studied subclass is formed by the graphs with a normal spanning tree. We determine a larger subclass, the class of normally tracea…
We present two short proofs for Diestel's criterion that a connected graph has a normal spanning tree provided it contains no subdivision of a countable clique in which every edge has been replaced by uncountably many parallel edges.
We show that a graph $G$ has a normal spanning tree if and only if its vertex set is the union of countably many sets each separated from any subdivided infinite clique in $G$ by a finite set of vertices. This proves a conjecture by Brochet and Diestel from 1994, giving a common strengthening of two classical normal spanning tree criterions due to Jung and Halin. Moreover, our method gives a new, algorithmic proof of Halin's theorem that every connected graph not containing a subdivision of a countable clique has a normal spanning tree.
Halin proved in 1978 that there exists a normal spanning tree in every connected graph $G$ that satisfies the following two conditions: (i) $G$ contains no subdivision of a `fat' $K_{\aleph_0}$, one in which every edge has been replaced by uncountably many parallel edges; and (ii) $G$ has no $K_{\aleph_0}$ subgraph. We show that the second condition is unnecessary.
In a series of three papers we develop an end space theory for digraphs. Here in the third paper we introduce a concept of depth-first search trees in infinite digraphs, which we call normal spanning arborescences. We show that normal spanning arborescences are end-faithful: every end of the digraph is represented by exactly one ray in the normal spanning arborescence that starts from the root. We further show that this bijection extends to a homeomorphism between the end space of a digraph $D$, which may include limit edges between ends, and the end space of any normal arborescence with limit…
Let $B_n$ be a linear polyomino chain with $n$ squares. Let $B_n^2$ be the graph obtained by the strong prism of a linear polyomino chain with $n$ squares, i.e. the strong product of $K_2$ and $B_n$. In this paper, explicit expressions for degree-Kirchhoff index and number of spanning trees of $B^2_n$ are determined, respectively. Furthermore, it is interesting to find that the degree-Kirchhoff index of $B^2_n$ is almost one eighth of its Gutman index.
In a series of four papers we determine structures whose existence is dual, in the sense of complementary, to the existence of stars or combs. Here, in the third paper of the series, we present duality theorems for a combination of stars and combs: undominated combs. We describe their complementary structures in terms of rayless trees and of tree-decompositions. Applications include a complete characterisation, in terms of normal spanning trees, of the graphs whose rays are dominated but which have no rayless spanning tree. Only two such graphs had so far been constructed, by Seymour and Thoma…
We show that every connected graph can be approximated by a normal tree, up to some arbitrarily small error phrased in terms of neighbourhoods around its ends. The existence of such approximate normal trees has consequences of both combinatorial and topological nature. On the combinatorial side, we show that a graph has a normal spanning tree as soon as it has normal spanning trees locally at each end; i.e., the only obstruction for a graph to having a normal spanning tree is an end for which none of its neighbourhoods has a normal spanning tree. On the topological side, we show that the end s…
A rainbow spanning tree in an edge-colored graph is a spanning tree in which each edge is a different color. Carraher, Hartke, and Horn showed that for $n$ and $C$ large enough, if $G$ is an edge-colored copy of $K_n$ in which each color class has size at most $n/2$, then $G$ has at least $\lfloor n/(C\log n)\rfloor$ edge-disjoint rainbow spanning trees. Here we strengthen this result by showing that if $G$ is any edge-colored graph with $n$ vertices in which each color appears on at most $δ\cdotλ_1/2$ edges, where $δ\geq C\log n$ for $n$ and $C$ sufficiently large and $λ_1$ is the second-smal…
We give new general formulas for the asymptotics of the number of spanning trees of a large graph. A special case answers a question of McKay (1983) for regular graphs. The general answer involves a quantity for infinite graphs that we call "tree entropy", which we show is a logarithm of a normalized determinant of the graph Laplacian for infinite graphs. Tree entropy is also expressed using random walks. We relate tree entropy to the metric entropy of the uniform spanning forest process on quasi-transitive amenable graphs, extending a result of Burton and Pemantle (1993).
Resistance distance is a novel distance function, also a new intrinsic graph metric, which makes some extensions of ordinary distance. Let On be a linear crossed octagonal graph. Recently, Pan and Li (2018) derived the closed formulas for the Kirchhoff index, multiplicative degree-Kirchhoff index and the number of spanning trees of Hn. They pointed that it is interesting to give the explicit formulas for the Kirchhoff and multiplicative degree-Kirchhoff indices of On. Inspired by these, in this paper, two resistance distance-based graph invariants, namely, Kirchhoff and multiplicative degree-K…
