The critical window for the classical Ramsey-Tur\'an problem

The first application of Szemer\'edi's powerful regularity method was the following celebrated Ramsey-Tur\'an result proved by Szemer\'edi in 1972: any K_4-free graph on N vertices with independence number o(N) has at most (1/8 + o(1)) N^2 edges. Four years later, Bollob\'as and Erd\H{o}s gave a surprising geometric construction, utilizing the isoperimetric inequality for the high dimensional sphere, of a K_4-free graph on N vertices with independence number o(N) and (1/8 - o(1)) N^2 edges. Starting with Bollob\'as and Erd\H{o}s in 1976, several problems have been asked on estimating the minimum possible independence number in the critical window, when the number of edges is about N^2 / 8. These problems have received considerable attention and remained one of the main open problems in this area. In this paper, we give nearly best-possible bounds, solving the various open problems concerning this critical window.Comment: 34 page

Bipartite induced density in triangle-free graphs

We prove that any triangle-free graph on $n$ vertices with minimum degree at least $d$ contains a bipartite induced subgraph of minimum degree at least $d^2/(2n)$. This is sharp up to a logarithmic factor in $n$. Relatedly, we show that the fractional chromatic number of any such triangle-free graph is at most the minimum of $n/d$ and $(2+o(1))\sqrt{n/\log n}$ as $n\to\infty$. This is sharp up to constant factors. Similarly, we show that the list chromatic number of any such triangle-free graph is at most $O(\min\{\sqrt{n},(n\log n)/d\})$ as $n\to\infty$. Relatedly, we also make two conjectures. First, any triangle-free graph on $n$ vertices has fractional chromatic number at most $(\sqrt{2}+o(1))\sqrt{n/\log n}$ as $n\to\infty$. Second, any triangle-free graph on $n$ vertices has list chromatic number at most $O(\sqrt{n/\log n})$ as $n\to\infty$.Comment: 20 pages; in v2 added note of concurrent work and one reference; in v3 added more notes of ensuing work and a result towards one of the conjectures (for list colouring

Independence ratio and random eigenvectors in transitive graphs

A theorem of Hoffman gives an upper bound on the independence ratio of regular graphs in terms of the minimum $\lambda_{\min}$ of the spectrum of the adjacency matrix. To complement this result we use random eigenvectors to gain lower bounds in the vertex-transitive case. For example, we prove that the independence ratio of a $3$-regular transitive graph is at least $$q=\frac{1}{2}-\frac{3}{4\pi}\arccos\biggl(\frac{1-\lambda _{\min}}{4}\biggr).$$ The same bound holds for infinite transitive graphs: we construct factor of i.i.d. independent sets for which the probability that any given vertex is in the set is at least $q-o(1)$. We also show that the set of the distributions of factor of i.i.d. processes is not closed w.r.t. the weak topology provided that the spectrum of the graph is uncountable.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOP952 in the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Pseudo-random graphs

Random graphs have proven to be one of the most important and fruitful concepts in modern Combinatorics and Theoretical Computer Science. Besides being a fascinating study subject for their own sake, they serve as essential instruments in proving an enormous number of combinatorial statements, making their role quite hard to overestimate. Their tremendous success serves as a natural motivation for the following very general and deep informal questions: what are the essential properties of random graphs? How can one tell when a given graph behaves like a random graph? How to create deterministically graphs that look random-like? This leads us to a concept of pseudo-random graphs and the aim of this survey is to provide a systematic treatment of this concept.Comment: 50 page