English

A note on the saturation number for unions of three cliques

Combinatorics 2026-08-01 v1

Abstract

A graph GG is FF-saturated if GG contains no copy of FF but G+eG+e contains a copy of FF for every missing edge ee of GG. The saturation number \sat(n,F)\sat(n,F) is the minimum number of edges in an nn-vertex FF-saturated graph. Motivated by a problem posed by Faudree, Ferrara, Gould, and Jacobson concerning KpKqKq+1K_p\cup K_q\cup K_{q+1}, we determine the saturation number and the unique extremal graph for KpKqKrK_p\cup K_q\cup K_r whenever 2pq<r<p+q2\le p\le q<r<p+q and nn is sufficiently large. Together with the previously known results for rp+qr\ge p+q and for r=qr=q, this completes the determination of the saturation number and the extremal graphs for unions of three cliques, for all sufficiently large nn.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.00459,
  title  = {A note on the saturation number for unions of three cliques},
  author = {Hanlai Lin and Zhen He and Yiduo Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.00459},
  year   = {2026}
}

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6 pages