An analogue of Edmonds' Branching Theorem for infinite digraphs

Abstract

We extend Edmonds' Branching Theorem to locally finite infinite digraphs. As examples of Oxley or Aharoni and Thomassen show, this cannot be done using ordinary arborescences, whose underlying graphs are trees. Instead we introduce the notion of pseudo-arborescences and prove a corresponding packing result. Finally, we verify some tree-like properties for these objects, but give also an example that their underlying graphs do in general not correspond to topological trees in the Freudenthal compactification of the underlying multigraph of the digraph.