Structural convergence and algebraic roots

Abstract Structural convergence is a framework for the convergence of graphs by Nešetřil and Ossona de Mendez that unifies the dense (left) graph convergence and Benjamini-Schramm convergence. They posed a problem asking whether for a given sequence of graphs $(G_n)$ converging to a limit $L$ and a vertex $r$ of $L$ , it is possible to find a sequence of vertices $(r_n)$ such that $L$ rooted at $r$ is the limit of the graphs $G_n$ rooted at $r_n$ . A counterexample was found by Christofides and Král’, but they showed that the statement holds for almost all vertices $r$ of $L$ . We offer another perspective on the original problem by considering the size of definable sets to which the root $r$ belongs. We prove that if $r$ is an algebraic vertex (i.e. belongs to a finite definable set), the sequence of roots $(r_n)$ always exists.