A Ramsey-Tur\'an theory for tilings in graphs

TL;DR

This paper establishes Ramsey--Turán-type theorems for graph tilings, identifying minimum degree and independence number conditions that guarantee near-perfect tilings for various graph classes, including cliques, trees, and cycles.

Contribution

It provides tight bounds and unifies previous results on graph tilings under degree and independence constraints, extending to random perturbations.

Findings

For cliques, near-perfect tilings are guaranteed under certain degree and independence conditions.

Conditions are tight; the number of uncovered vertices cannot be improved.

Results extend to trees, cycles, and perturbed graphs, with new thresholds and conditions.

Abstract

For a $k$-vertex graph $F$ and an $n$-vertex graph $G$, an $F$-tiling in $G$ is a collection of vertex-disjoint copies of $F$ in $G$. For $r\in \mathbb{N}$, the $r$-independence number of $G$, denoted $\alpha_r(G)$ is the largest size of a $K_r$-free set of vertices in $G$. In this paper, we discuss Ramsey--Tur\'an-type theorems for tilings where one is interested in minimum degree and independence number conditions (and the interaction between the two) that guarantee the existence of optimal $F$-tilings. For cliques, we show that for any $k\geq 3$ and $\eta>0$, any graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with $\delta(G)\geq \eta n$ and $\alpha_k(G)=o(n)$ has a $K_k$-tiling covering all but $\lfloor\tfrac{1}{\eta}\rfloor(k-1)$ vertices. All conditions in this result are tight; the number of vertices left uncovered can not be improved and for $\eta<\tfrac{1}{k}$, a condition of $\alpha_{k-1}(G)=o(n)$ would not suffice. When $\eta>\tfrac{1}{k}$, we then show that $\alpha_{k-1}(G)=o(n)$ does suffice, but not $\alpha_{k-2}(G)=o(n)$. These results unify and generalise previous results of Balogh-Molla-Sharifzadeh, Nenadov-Pehova and Balogh-McDowell-Molla-Mycroft on the subject. We further explore the picture when $F$ is a tree or a cycle and discuss the effect of replacing the independence number condition with $\alpha^*(G)=o(n)$ (meaning that any pair of disjoint linear sized sets induce an edge between them) where one can force perfect $F$-tilings covering all the vertices. Finally we discuss the consequences of these results in the randomly perturbed setting.