Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Given a surface, intersection information about the simple closed curves on the surface is encoded in its curve graph. Vertices are homotopy classes of curves, and edges connect vertices corresponding to curves with disjoint representatives. We can wonder what subgraphs of the curve graph are possible for a given surface. For example, if we fix a surface, then a graph with sufficiently large clique number cannot be a subgraph of its curve graph. This is because there are only so many distinct and mutually disjoint curves in a given surface. We will discuss a new obstruction to a graph being a subgraph of individual curve graphs given recently by Bering, Conant, and Gaster.