English

The Ramsey community number as a renormalization-group crossing

Statistical Mechanics 2026-07-07 v1 Combinatorics Physics and Society

Abstract

The Ramsey community number rkr_k is the smallest size at which a network is better described by communities than by none, under a Bayesian detection rule. On the diamond hierarchical lattice we show that rkr_k is an exact renormalization-group crossing: the block-model sufficient statistics obey a linear map with eigenvalues {bs,b}\{bs,b\}, the degree-corrected evidence density flows to lnK\ln K at a community fixed point, and rkr_k is the generation at which the running evidence clears the detection threshold. Degree correction advances detection by two generations. We derive rk(b,s;q)r_k(b,s;q) in closed form for the whole family. Finally, placing on the lattice the Reichardt--Bornholdt community Hamiltonian -- whose ground state is the partition itself -- we find an exact community-ordered phase: below the ferromagnetic critical temperature the two hubs lock into opposite communities for any resolution γ>0\gamma>0, a staggered order that persists as nn\to\infty. Allowing each nested sub-community its own label, the optimal partition is a hierarchy of qoptnq_{\rm opt}\sim\sqrt{n} communities, so the number of Potts states that best describes the network grows with the network. This hierarchy orders thermally level by level, through a cascade of first-order transitions whose temperatures fall as 1/lnq1/\ln q, so every stable level persists as nn\to\infty: the emergent partition is detectable, optimal, and thermodynamically ordered.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.05954,
  title  = {The Ramsey community number as a renormalization-group crossing},
  author = {Alexei Vazquez},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.05954},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 6 figures