English

Blow-up lemmas for sparse graphs

Combinatorics 2025-08-29 v5

Abstract

The blow-up lemma states that a system of super-regular pairs contains all bounded degree spanning graphs as subgraphs that embed into a corresponding system of complete pairs. This lemma has far-reaching applications in extremal combinatorics. We prove sparse analogues of the blow-up lemma for subgraphs of random and of pseudorandom graphs. Our main results are the following three sparse versions of the blow-up lemma: one for embedding spanning graphs with maximum degree Δ\Delta in subgraphs of G(n,p)G(n,p) with p=C(logn/n)1/Δp=C(\log n/n)^{1/\Delta}; one for embedding spanning graphs with maximum degree Δ\Delta and degeneracy DD in subgraphs of G(n,p)G(n,p) with p=CΔ(logn/n)1/(2D+1)p=C_\Delta\big(\log n/n\big)^{1/(2D+1)}; and one for embedding spanning graphs with maximum degree Δ\Delta in (p,cpmax(4,(3Δ+1)/2)n)(p,cp^{\max(4,(3\Delta+1)/2)}n)-bijumbled graphs. We also consider various applications of these lemmas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1612.00622,
  title  = {Blow-up lemmas for sparse graphs},
  author = {Peter Allen and Julia Böttcher and Hiep Hàn and Yoshiharu Kohayakawa and Yury Person},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.00622},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

141 pages, 3 figures, final version for Discrete Analysis

R2 v1 2026-06-22T17:11:34.816Z