Well-Quasi-Ordering Eulerian Digraphs Embeddable in Surfaces by Strong Immersion

Abstract: We prove that for every surface $\Sigma$, the class of Eulerian directed graphs that are Eulerian embeddable into $\Sigma$ (in particular they have degree at most $4$) is well-quasi-ordered by strong immersion. This result marks one of the most versatile directed graph classes (besides tournaments) for which we are aware of a positive well-quasi-ordering result regarding a well-studied graph relation. Our result implies that the class of bipartite circle graphs is well-quasi-ordered under the pivot-minor relation. Furthermore, this also yields two other interesting applications, namely, a polynomial-time algorithm for testing immersion closed properties of Eulerian-embeddable graphs into a fixed surface, and a characterisation of the Erd\H{o}s-P\'osa property for Eulerian digraphs of maximum degree four. Further, in order to prove the mentioned result, we prove that Eulerian digraphs of carving width bounded by some constant $k$ (which correspond to Eulerian digraphs with bounded treewidth and additionally bounded degree) are well-quasi-ordered by strong immersion. We actually prove a stronger result where we allow for vertices of the Eulerian digraphs to be labeled by elements of some well-quasi-order $\Omega$. We complement these results with a proof that the class of Eulerian planar digraphs of treewidth at most $3$ is not well-quasi-ordered by strong immersion, noting that any antichain of bounded treewidth cannot have bounded degree.