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Sparse Euclidean Spanners with Tiny Diameter: A Tight Lower Bound Le, Hung Milenković, Lazar Solomon, Shay Euclidean spanners hop-diameter inverse-Ackermann lower bounds sparse spanners In STOC'95 [ADMSS95] Arya et al. showed that any set of n points in R^d admits a (1+ε)-spanner with hop-diameter at most 2 (respectively, 3) and O(n log n) edges (resp., O(n log log n) edges). They also gave a general upper bound tradeoff of hop-diameter at most k and O(n α_k(n)) edges, for any k≥2. The function α_k is the inverse of a certain Ackermann-style function at the ⌊k/2⌋th level of the primitive recursive hierarchy, where α₀(n)=⌈n/2⌉, α₁(n)=⌈√n⌉, α₂(n)=⌈log n⌉, α₃(n)=⌈log log n⌉, α₄(n)=log^* n, α₅(n)=⌊1/2 log^*n⌋, .... Roughly speaking, for k≥2 the function α_{k} is close to ⌊(k-2)/2⌋-iterated log-star function, i.e., log with ⌊(k-2)/2⌋ stars. Also, α_{2α(n)+4}(n)≤4, where α(n) is the one-parameter inverse Ackermann function, which is an extremely slowly growing function. Whether or not this tradeoff is tight has remained open, even for the cases k=2 and k=3. Two lower bounds are known: The first applies only to spanners with stretch 1 and the second is sub-optimal and applies only to sufficiently large (constant) values of k. In this paper we prove a tight lower bound for any constant k: For any fixed ε>0, any (1+ε)-spanner for the uniform line metric with hop-diameter at most k must have at least Ω(n α_k(n)) edges. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Hung Le and Lazar Milenković and Shay Solomon 2022 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 224, 38th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2022) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2022.54 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-160629 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2022.54 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode