English

The extremal number of cycles with all diagonals

Combinatorics 2023-08-31 v1

Abstract

In 1975, Erd\H{o}s asked the following natural question: What is the maximum number of edges that an nn-vertex graph can have without containing a cycle with all diagonals? Erd\H{o}s observed that the upper bound O(n5/3)O(n^{5/3}) holds since the complete bipartite graph K3,3K_{3,3} can be viewed as a cycle of length six with all diagonals. In this paper, we resolve this old problem. We prove that there exists a constant CC such that every nn-vertex with Cn3/2Cn^{3/2} edges contains a cycle with all diagonals. Since any cycle with all diagonals contains cycles of length four, this bound is best possible using well-known constructions of graphs without a four-cycle based on finite geometry. Among other ideas, our proof involves a novel lemma about finding an `almost-spanning' robust expander which might be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.16163,
  title  = {The extremal number of cycles with all diagonals},
  author = {Domagoj Bradač and Abhishek Methuku and Benny Sudakov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.16163},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

14 pages, comments welcome!