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

Monochromatic Clique Decompositions of Graphs

Let $G$ be a graph whose edges are coloured with $k$ colours, and $\mathcal H=(H_1,\dots , H_k)$ be a $k$-tuple of graphs. A monochromatic $\mathcal H$-decomposition of $G$ is a partition of the edge set of $G$ such that each part is either a single edge or forms a monochromatic copy of $H_i$ in colour $i$, for some $1\le i\le k$. Let $\phi_{k}(n,\mathcal H)$ be the smallest number $\phi$, such that, for every order-$n$ graph and every $k$-edge-colouring, there is a monochromatic $\mathcal H$-decomposition with at most $\phi$ elements. Extending the previous results of Liu and Sousa ["Monochromatic $K_r$-decompositions of graphs", Journal of Graph Theory}, 76:89--100, 2014], we solve this problem when each graph in $\mathcal H$ is a clique and $n\ge n_0(\mathcal H)$ is sufficiently large.Comment: 14 pages; to appear in J Graph Theor

Constructing dense graphs with sublinear Hadwiger number

Mader asked to explicitly construct dense graphs for which the size of the largest clique minor is sublinear in the number of vertices. Such graphs exist as a random graph almost surely has this property. This question and variants were popularized by Thomason over several articles. We answer these questions by showing how to explicitly construct such graphs using blow-ups of small graphs with this property. This leads to the study of a fractional variant of the clique minor number, which may be of independent interest.Comment: 10 page

Some results on chromatic number as a function of triangle count

A variety of powerful extremal results have been shown for the chromatic number of triangle-free graphs. Three noteworthy bounds are in terms of the number of vertices, edges, and maximum degree given by Poljak \& Tuza (1994), and Johansson. There have been comparatively fewer works extending these types of bounds to graphs with a small number of triangles. One noteworthy exception is a result of Alon et. al (1999) bounding the chromatic number for graphs with low degree and few triangles per vertex; this bound is nearly the same as for triangle-free graphs. This type of parametrization is much less rigid, and has appeared in dozens of combinatorial constructions. In this paper, we show a similar type of result for $\chi(G)$ as a function of the number of vertices $n$, the number of edges $m$, as well as the triangle count (both local and global measures). Our results smoothly interpolate between the generic bounds true for all graphs and bounds for triangle-free graphs. Our results are tight for most of these cases; we show how an open problem regarding fractional chromatic number and degeneracy in triangle-free graphs can resolve the small remaining gap in our bounds