Twin-Width of Graphs on Surfaces

Daniel Král, Kristýna Pekárková, Kenny Storgel

Abstract: Twin-width is a width parameter introduced by Bonnet, Kim, Thomassé and Watrigant [FOCS'20, JACM'22], which has many structural and algorithmic applications. Hliněný and Jedelský [ICALP'23] showed that every planar graph has twin-width at most 8. We prove that the twin-width of every graph embeddable in a surface of Euler genus g is at most 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{6, 32g-37}.