The Erdos-Hajnal conjecture states that if a graph on n vertices is H-free,
that is, it does not contain an induced copy of a given graph H, then it must
contain either a clique or an independent set of size n^{d(H)}, where d(H) > 0
depends only on the graph H. Except for a few special cases, this conjecture
remains wide open. However, it is known that a H-free graph must contain a
complete or empty bipartite graph with parts of polynomial size. We prove an
analogue of this result for 3-uniform hypergraphs, showing that if a 3-uniform
hypergraph on n vertices is H-free, for any given H, then it must contain a
complete or empty tripartite subgraph with parts of order c(log n)^{1/2 +
d(H)}, where d(H) > 0 depends only on H. This improves on the bound of c(log
n)^{1/2}, which holds in all 3-uniform hypergraphs, and, up to the value of the
constant d(H), is best possible. We also prove that, for k > 3, no analogue of
the standard Erdos-Hajnal conjecture can hold in k-uniform hypergraphs. That
is, there are k-uniform hypergraphs H and sequences of H-free hypergraphs which
do not contain cliques or independent sets of size appreciably larger than one
would normally expect.Comment: 15 page
