An improved bound on the treewidth of planar graphs excluding a grid minor

We show that every planar graph with no $t \times t$ grid minor has treewidth at most $4t +4$. This improves on the previously best known bound of $\frac{9}{2}t - \frac{11}{2}$, due to Gu and Tamaki (2012), and is within a factor $2$ of optimal. A key step in the proof is showing the following res