Product Structure and Treewidth of Hyperbolic Uniform Disk Graphs

Abstract: Hyperbolic uniform disk graphs (HUDGs) are intersection graphs of disks with some radius $r$ in the hyperbolic plane, where $r$ may be constant or depend on the number of vertices in a family of HUDGs. We show that HUDGs with constant clique number do not admit \emph{product structure}, i.e., that there is no constant $c$ such that every such graph is a subgraph of $H \boxtimes P$ for some graph $H$ of treewidth at most $c$. This justifies that HUDGs are described as not having a grid-like structure in the literature, and is in contrast to unit disk graphs in the Euclidean plane, whose grid-like structure is evident from the fact that they are subgraphs of the strong product of two paths and a clique of constant size [Dvořák et al., '21, MATRIX Annals]. By allowing $H$ to be any graph of constant treewidth instead of a path-like graph, we reject the possibility of a grid-like structure not merely by the maximum degree (which is unbounded for HUDGs) but due to their global structure. We complement this by showing that for every (sub-)constant $r$, HUDGs admit product structure, whereas the typical hyperbolic behavior is observed if $r$ grows with the number of vertices. Our proof involves a family of $n$-vertex HUDGs with radius $\log n$ that has bounded clique number but unbounded treewidth, and one for which the ratio of treewidth and clique number is $\log n / \log \log n$. Up to a $\log \log n$ factor, this negatively answers a question raised by Bläsius et al. [SoCG '25] asking whether balanced separators of HUDGs with radius $\log n$ can be covered by less than $\log n$ cliques. Our results also imply that the local and layered tree-independence number of HUDGs are both unbounded, answering an open question of Dallard et al. [arXiv '25].