English

Density of monochromatic infinite subgraphs

Combinatorics 2018-08-16 v3

Abstract

For any countably infinite graph GG, Ramsey's theorem guarantees an infinite monochromatic copy of GG in any rr-coloring of the edges of the countably infinite complete graph KNK_\mathbb{N}. Taking this a step further, it is natural to wonder how "large" of a monochromatic copy of GG we can find with respect to some measure -- for instance, the density (or upper density) of the vertex set of GG in the positive integers. Unlike finite Ramsey theory, where this question has been studied extensively, the analogous problem for infinite graphs has been mostly overlooked. In one of the few results in the area, Erd\H{o}s and Galvin proved that in every 2-coloring of KNK_\mathbb{N}, there exists a monochromatic path whose vertex set has upper density at least 2/32/3, but it is not possible to do better than 8/98/9. They also showed that for some sequence ϵn0\epsilon_n\to 0, there exists a monochromatic path PP such that for infinitely many nn, the set {1,2,...,n}\{1,2,...,n\} contains the first (13+3ϵn)n(\frac{1}{3+\sqrt{3}}-\epsilon_n)n vertices of PP, but it is not possible to do better than 2n/32n/3. We improve both results, in the former case achieving an upper density at least 3/43/4 and in the latter case obtaining a tight bound of 2/32/3. We also consider related problems for directed paths, trees (connected subgraphs), and a more general result which includes locally finite graphs for instance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.05423,
  title  = {Density of monochromatic infinite subgraphs},
  author = {Louis DeBiasio and Paul McKenney},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.05423},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

24 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Combinatorica. We discovered that Theorem 6.2 from version 2 of this paper contained an irreparable error. As Theorem 6.2 was independent of the rest of the paper, we have simply removed Subsection 6.1 (which contained Theorem 6.2) from the final version