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Tangles, tree-decompositions and grids in matroids. (English) Zbl 1229.05070
Summary: A tangle in a matroid is an obstruction to small branch-width. In particular, the maximum order of a tangle is equal to the branch-width. We prove that: (i) there is a tree-decomposition of a matroid that “displays” all of the maximal tangles, and (ii) when $$M$$ is representable over a finite field, each tangle of sufficiently large order “dominates” a large grid-minor. This extends results of Robertson and Seymour concerning Graph Minors.

##### MSC:
 05B35 Combinatorial aspects of matroids and geometric lattices 05C70 Edge subsets with special properties (factorization, matching, partitioning, covering and packing, etc.) 05C83 Graph minors
##### Keywords:
branch-width; tangles; tree-decomposition; matroids; graph minors
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##### References:
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