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

On the size of identifying codes in triangle-free graphs

In an undirected graph $G$, a subset $C\subseteq V(G)$ such that $C$ is a dominating set of $G$, and each vertex in $V(G)$ is dominated by a distinct subset of vertices from $C$, is called an identifying code of $G$. The concept of identifying codes was introduced by Karpovsky, Chakrabarty and Levitin in 1998. For a given identifiable graph $G$, let \M(G) be the minimum cardinality of an identifying code in $G$. In this paper, we show that for any connected identifiable triangle-free graph $G$ on $n$ vertices having maximum degree $\Delta\geq 3$, \M(G)\le n-\tfrac{n}{\Delta+o(\Delta)}. This bound is asymptotically tight up to constants due to various classes of graphs including $(\Delta-1)$-ary trees, which are known to have their minimum identifying code of size $n-\tfrac{n}{\Delta-1+o(1)}$. We also provide improved bounds for restricted subfamilies of triangle-free graphs, and conjecture that there exists some constant $c$ such that the bound \M(G)\le n-\tfrac{n}{\Delta}+c holds for any nontrivial connected identifiable graph $G$

Nombre chromatique fractionnaire, degré maximum et maille

We prove new lower bounds on the independence ratio of graphs of maximum degree ∆ ∈ {3,4,5} and girth g ∈ {6,…,12}, notably 1/3 when (∆,g)=(4,10) and 2/7 when (∆,g)=(5,8). We establish a general upper bound on the fractional chromatic number of triangle-free graphs, which implies that deduced from the fractional version of Reed's bound for triangle-free graphs and improves it as soon as ∆ ≥ 17, matching the best asymptotic upper bound known for off-diagonal Ramsey numbers. In particular, the fractional chromatic number of a triangle-free graph of maximum degree ∆ is less than 9.916 if ∆=17, less than 22.17 if ∆=50 and less than 249.06 if ∆=1000. Focusing on smaller values of ∆, we also demonstrate that every graph of girth at least 7 and maximum degree ∆ has fractional chromatic number at most min (2∆ + 2^{k-3}+k)/k pour k ∈ ℕ. In particular, the fractional chromatic number of a graph of girth 7 and maximum degree ∆ is at most (2∆+9)/5 when ∆ ∈ [3,8], at most (∆+7)/3 when ∆ ∈  [8,20], at most (2∆+23)/7 when ∆ ∈ [20,48], and at most ∆/4+5 when ∆ ∈ [48,112]

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

Size of the Largest Induced Forest in Subcubic Graphs of Girth at least Four and Five

In this paper, we address the maximum number of vertices of induced forests in subcubic graphs with girth at least four or five. We provide a unified approach to prove that every 2-connected subcubic graph on $n$ vertices and $m$ edges with girth at least four or five, respectively, has an induced forest on at least $n-\frac{2}{9}m$ or $n-\frac{1}{5}m$ vertices, respectively, except for finitely many exceptional graphs. Our results improve a result of Liu and Zhao and are tight in the sense that the bounds are attained by infinitely many 2-connected graphs. Equivalently, we prove that such graphs admit feedback vertex sets with size at most $\frac{2}{9}m$ or $\frac{1}{5}m$, respectively. Those exceptional graphs will be explicitly constructed, and our result can be easily modified to drop the 2-connectivity requirement