Generalized Ramsey–Turán density for cliques

Abstract

We study the generalized Ramsey–Turán function $\mathrm {RT}(n,K_s,K_t,o(n))$ , which is the maximum possible number of copies of $K_s$ in an n-vertex $K_t$ -free graph with independence number $o(n)$ . The case when $s=2$ was settled by Erdős, Sós, Bollobás, Hajnal, and Szemerédi in the 1980s. We combinatorially resolve the general case for all $s\ge 3$ , showing that the (asymptotic) extremal graphs for this problem have simple (bounded) structures. In particular, it implies that the extremal structures follow a periodic pattern when t is much larger than s. Our results disprove a conjecture of Balogh, Liu, and Sharifzadeh and show that a relaxed version does hold.

Keywords

• 05C35
• 05D10