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
