The critical window for the classical Ramsey-Turán problem

Abstract

The first application of Szemerédi's powerful regularity method was the following celebrated Ramsey-Turán result proved by Szemerédi in 1972: any K_4-free graph on N vertices with independence number o(N) has at most (1/8 + o(1)) N^2 edges. Four years later, Bollobás and Erdős gave a surprising geometric construction, utilizing the isoperimetric inequality for the high dimensional sphere, of a K_4-free graph on N vertices with independence number o(N) and (1/8 - o(1)) N^2 edges. Starting with Bollobás and Erdős in 1976, several problems have been asked on estimating the minimum possible independence number in the critical window, when the number of edges is about N^2 / 8. These problems have received considerable attention and remained one of the main open problems in this area. In this paper, we give nearly best-possible bounds, solving the various open problems concerning this critical window.