Robertson's conjecture and universal finite generation in the homology of graph braid groups

Abstract

We formulate a categorification of Robertson's conjecture analogous to the categorical graph minor conjecture of Miyata--Proudfood--Ramos. We show that these conjectures imply the existence of a finite list of atomic graphs generating the homology of configuration spaces of graphs -- in fixed degree, with a fixed number of particles, under topological embeddings. We explain how the simplest case of our conjecture follows from work of Barter and Miyata--Proudfoot, implying that the category of cographs is Noetherian, a result of potential independent interest.