Separators in Region Intersection Graphs

For undirected graphs G=(V,E) and G_0=(V_0,E_0), say that G is a region intersection graph over G_0 if there is a family of connected subsets {R_u \subseteq V_0 : u \in V} of G_0 such that {u,v} \in E \iff R_u \cap R_v \neq \emptyset. We show if G_0 excludes the complete graph K_h as a minor for some h \geq 1, then every region intersection graph G over G_0 with m edges has a balanced separator with at most c_h \sqrt{m} nodes, where c_h is a constant depending only on h. If G additionally has uniformly bounded vertex degrees, then such a separator is found by spectral partitioning. A string graph is the intersection graph of continuous arcs in the plane. String graphs are precisely region intersection graphs over planar graphs. Thus the preceding result implies that every string graph with m edges has a balanced separator of size O(\sqrt{m}). This bound is optimal, as it generalizes the planar separator theorem. It confirms a conjecture of Fox and Pach (2010), and improves over the O(\sqrt{m} \log m) bound of Matousek (2013).