Draft — mutable and not usable as a dependency; its citation marks the draft state.

Lax1Twin-Width Can Be Exponential in Treewidth

Édouard Bonnet @EdouardBonnet

created 2026-07-23·github.com/jan3er/lax-submissions@c30630a/twin-width-treewidth-separation·Lean v4.30.0 · mathlib c5ea00351c28

Abstract

This submission proves the Bonnet–Déprés separation in the form: for every natural number kk, there is a finite simple graph GG with treewidth(G)2k+4\mathrm{treewidth}(G) \le 2k+4 and 2k<twinWidth(G)2^k < \mathrm{twinWidth}(G).

The concept surface has three review units: the complete definition of treewidth, the complete definition of twin-width, and the separation theorem. Treewidth is phrased through tree decompositions with a bag-size bound; twin-width through contraction sequences of vertex partitions whose red degrees are derived from homogeneity in the graph, so no auxiliary state is carried alongside the partitions. Both parameters are infima of explicit sets of naturals, and the separation is stated over the canonical finite vertex types Fin n\mathrm{Fin}\ n. The proof constructs the explicit Bonnet–Déprés graph BDkBD_k in a trigraph-based source development and bridges it to the submitted concepts through the invariant that, along any contraction sequence, black pairs are exactly the complete pairs and red pairs exactly the non-homogeneous pairs.

Ported from the original formalization by Édouard Bonnet (github.com/EdouardBonnet/leaning, twin-width, MIT-licensed).

Concepts

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Cite this

@misc{Lax1,
  author = {Édouard Bonnet},
  title = {Twin-Width Can Be Exponential in Treewidth},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {Lax Archive, Lax1},
  url = {https://laxarchive.org/Lax1/},
  note = {draft},
}

References

@article{BonnetDepres2023,
  author  = {Bonnet, {\'E}douard and D{\'e}pr{\'e}s, Hugues},
  title   = {Twin-width can be exponential in treewidth},
  journal = {Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B},
  volume  = {161},
  pages   = {1--14},
  year    = {2023},
  doi     = {10.1016/j.jctb.2023.01.003}
}