English

The evolution of unavoidable bi-chromatic patterns and extremal cases of balanceability

Combinatorics 2023-06-08 v2

Abstract

We study the color patterns that, for nn sufficiently large, are unavoidable in 22-colorings of the edges of a complete graph KnK_n with respect to min{e(R),e(B)}\min \{e(R), e(B)\}, where e(R)e(R) and e(B)e(B) are the numbers of red and, respectively, blue edges. More precisely, we determine how such unavoidable patterns evolve from the case without restriction in the coloring, namely that min{e(R),e(B)}0\min \{e(R), e(B)\} \ge 0 (given by Ramsey's theorem), to the highest possible restriction, namely that e(R)e(B)1|e(R) - e(B)| \le 1. We also investigate the effect of forbidding certain sub-structures in each color. In particular, we show that, in 22-colorings whose graphs induced by each of the colors are both free from an induced matching on rr edges, the appearance of the unavoidable patterns is already granted with a much weaker restriction on min{e(R),e(B)}\min \{e(R), e(B)\}. We finish analyzing the consequences of these results to the balancing number bal(n,G)bal(n,G) of a graph GG (i.e. the minimum kk such that every 22-edge coloring of KnK_n with min{e(R),e(B)}>k\min \{e(R), e(B)\} > k contains a copy of GG with half the edges in each color), and show that, for every ε>0\varepsilon > 0, there are graphs GG with bal(n,G)cn2εbal(n,G) \ge c n^{2-\varepsilon}, which is the highest order of magnitude that is possible to achieve, as well as graphs where bal(n,G)c(G)bal(n,G) \le c(G), where c(G)c(G) is a constant that depends only GG. We characterize the latter ones.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.04269,
  title  = {The evolution of unavoidable bi-chromatic patterns and extremal cases of balanceability},
  author = {Yair Caro and Adriana Hansberg and Amanda Montejano},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.04269},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

16 pages, 2 figures