English

Upper density of monochromatic paths in edge-coloured infinite complete graphs and bipartite graphs

Combinatorics 2022-10-26 v3

Abstract

The upper density of an infinite graph GG with V(G)NV(G) \subseteq \mathbb{N} is defined as d(G)=lim supnV(G){1,,n}/n\overline{d}(G) = \limsup_{n \rightarrow \infty}{|V(G) \cap \{1,\ldots,n\}|}/{n}. Let KNK_{\mathbb{N}} be the infinite complete graph with vertex set N\mathbb{N}. Corsten, DeBiasio, Lamaison and Lang showed that in every 22-edge-colouring of KNK_{\mathbb{N}}, there exists a monochromatic path with upper density at least (12+8)/17(12 + \sqrt{8})/17, which is best possible. In this paper, we extend this result to kk-edge-colouring of KNK_{\mathbb{N}} for k3k \ge 3. We conjecture that every kk-edge-coloured KNK_{\mathbb{N}} contains a monochromatic path with upper density at least 1/(k1)1/(k-1), which is best possible (when k1k-1 is a prime power). We prove that this is true when k=3k = 3 and asymptotically when k=4k =4. Furthermore, we show that this problem can be deduced from its bipartite variant, which is of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.08767,
  title  = {Upper density of monochromatic paths in edge-coloured infinite complete graphs and bipartite graphs},
  author = {A. Nicholas Day and Allan Lo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08767},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

fixed some typos