English

Ramsey problems for graphs in Euclidean spaces and Cartesian powers

Combinatorics 2025-12-19 v2

Abstract

Given a graph HH, let χH(Rn)\chi_H(\mathbb{R}^n) be the smallest positive integer rr such that there exists an rr-coloring of Rn\mathbb{R}^n with no monochromatic unit-copy of HH, that is a set of V(H)|V(H)| vertices of the same color such that any two vertices corresponding to an edge of HH are at distance one. This Ramsey-type function extends the famous Hadwiger--Nelson problem on the chromatic number χ(Rn)=χK2(Rn)\chi(\mathbb{R}^n)=\chi_{K_2}(\mathbb{R}^n) of the space from a complete graph K2K_2 on two vertices to an arbitrary graph HH. It also extends the classical Euclidean Ramsey problem for congruent monochromatic subsets to the family of those defined by a specific subset of unit distances. Among others, we show that χH(Rn)=χ(Rn)\chi_H(\mathbb{R}^n)=\chi(\mathbb{R}^n) for any even cycle HH of length 88 or at least 1212 as well as for any forest and that χH(Rn)=χ(Rn)/2\chi_H(\mathbb{R}^n)=\lceil\chi(\mathbb{R}^n)/2\rceil for any sufficiently long odd cycle. Our main tools and results, which are of independent interest, establish that Cartesian powers enjoy Ramsey-type properties for graphs with favorable Tur\'an-type characteristics, such as zero hypercube Tur\'an density. In addition, we prove induced variants of these results, find bounds on χH(Rn)\chi_H(\mathbb{R}^n) for growing dimensions nn, and prove a canonical-type result. We conclude with many open problems. One of these is to determine χC4(R2)\chi_{C_4}(\mathbb{R}^2), for a cycle C4C_4 on four vertices.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.15516,
  title  = {Ramsey problems for graphs in Euclidean spaces and Cartesian powers},
  author = {Maria Axenovich and Dingyuan Liu and Arsenii Sagdeev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.15516},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

28 pages (including appendix), minor \LaTeX\ compilation errors fixed

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:29:23.076Z