Fan-complete Ramsey numbers

TL;DR

This paper investigates the conditions under which certain Ramsey numbers involving fan graphs and complete multipartite graphs are tight, providing new bounds and answering longstanding questions in graph theory.

Contribution

It establishes new lower bounds for fan-graph Ramsey numbers and characterizes when these numbers are tight, improving previous tower-type bounds and addressing Burr's question.

Findings

Proves $K_1 + nK_2$ is $K_p$-good for large $n$

Provides exact formulas for $r(G, K_1 + nH)$ under mild conditions

Improves bounds from tower-type to polynomial in $n$

Abstract

For graphs $G$ and $H$, we consider Ramsey numbers $r(G,H)$ with tight lower bounds, namely, $r(G,H) \geq (\chi(G)-1)(|H|-1)+1,$ where $\chi(G)$ denotes the chromatic number of $G$ and $|H|$ denotes the number of vertices in $H$. We say $H$ is $G$-good if the equality holds. Let $G+H$ be the join graph obtained from graphs $G$ and $H$ by adding all edges between the disjoint vertex sets of $G$ and $H$. Let $nH$ denote the union graph of $n$ disjoint copies of $H$. We show that $K_1+nH$ is $K_p$-good if $n$ is sufficiently large. In particular, the fan-graph $F_n=K_1 + n K_2$ is $K_p$-good if $n\geq 27p^2$, improving previous tower-type lower bounds for $n$ due to Li and Rousseau (1996). Moreover, we give a stronger lower bound inequality for Ramsey number $r(G, K_1+F)$ for the case of $G=K_p(a_1, a_2, \dots, a_p)$, the complete $p$-partite graph with $a_1=1$ and $a_i \leq a_{i+1}$. In particular, using a stability-supersaturation lemma by Fox, He and Wigderson (2021), we show that for any fixed graph $H$, \begin{align*} r(G,K_1+nH) = \left\{ \begin{array}{ll} (p-1)(n |H|+a_2-1)+1 & \textrm{if $n|H|+a_2-1$ is even or $a_2-1$ is even,}\\ (p-1)(n |H|+a_2-2)+1 & \textrm{otherwise,} \end{array} \right. \end{align*} where $G=K_p(1,a_2, \dots, a_p)$ with $a_i$'s satisfying some mild conditions and $n$ is sufficiently large. The special case of $H=K_1$ gives an answer to Burr's question (1981) about the discrepancy of $r(G, K_{1,n})$ from $G$-goodness for sufficiently large $n$. All bounds of $n$ we obtain are not of tower-types.