Rose McCarty, Vertex-minors and flooding immersions

An immersion of a graph H into a graph G sends edges of H into edge-disjoint trails of G. We say the immersion is flooding if every edge of G is in one of the trails. Flooding immersions are interesting for Eulerian group-labelled graphs; in this context they behave quite differently from regular immersions. Moreover, understanding such flooding immersions is a vital step towards understanding the structure of graphs with a forbidden vertex-minor.

I will focus on explaining the connection to vertex-minors, and on recent progress in this direction from ongoing joint work with Jim Geelen and Paul Wollan.