English

On a rainbow extremal problem for color-critical graphs

Combinatorics 2024-01-24 v1

Abstract

There has been extensive studies on the following question: given kk graphs G1,,GkG_1,\dots, G_k over a common vertex set of size nn, what conditions on GiG_i ensures a `colorful' copy of HH, i.e., a copy of HH containing at most one edge from each GiG_i? A lower bound on i[k]e(Gi)\sum_{i\in [k]} e(G_i) enforcing a colorful copy of a given graph HH was considered by Keevash, Saks, Sudakov, and Verstra\"{e}te. They defined exk(n,H)\operatorname{ex}_k(n,H) to be the maximum total number of edges of the graphs G1,,GkG_1,\dots, G_k on a common vertex set of size nn having no colorful copy of HH. They completely determined exk(n,Kr)\operatorname{ex}_k(n,K_r) for large nn by showing that, depending on the value of kk, one of the two natural constructions is always the extremal construction. Moreover, they conjectured the same holds for every color-critical graphs and proved it for 3-color-critical graphs. We prove their conjecture for 4-color-critical graphs and for almost all rr-color-critical graphs when r>4r > 4. Moreover, we show that for every non-color-critical non-bipartite graphs, none of the two natural constructions is extremal for certain values of kk. This answers a question of Keevash, Saks, Sudakov, and Verstra\"{e}te.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.02575,
  title  = {On a rainbow extremal problem for color-critical graphs},
  author = {Debsoumya Chakraborti and Jaehoon Kim and Hyunwoo Lee and Hong Liu and Jaehyeon Seo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02575},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:39:20.369Z