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Packing Cliques in Graphs with Independence Number 2

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2007

RAPHAEL YUSTER*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, University of Haifa, Haifa 31905, Israel (e-mail: raphy@research.haifa.ac.il)

Abstract

Let G be a graph with no three independent vertices. How many edges of G can be packed with edge-disjoint copies of Kk? More specifically, let fk(n, m) be the largest integer t such that, for any graph with n vertices, m edges, and independence number 2, at least t edges can be packed with edge-disjoint copies of Kk. Turán's theorem together with Wilson's Theorem assert that if . A conjecture of Erdős states that for all plausible m. For any ε > 0, this conjecture was open even if . Generally, f_k(n,m) may be significantly smaller than . Indeed, for k=7 it is easy to show that for m ≈ 0.3n2. Nevertheless, we prove the following result. For every k≥ 3 there exists γ>0 such that if then . In the special case k=3 we obtain the reasonable bound γ ≥ 10−4. In particular, the above conjecture of Erdős holds whenever G has fewer than 0.2501n2 edges.

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Paper
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2006

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