Graph with any rational density and no rich subsets of linear size

Abstract

A well-known application of the dependent random choice asserts that any $n$-vertex graph $G$ with positive edge density contains a `rich' vertex subset $U$ of size $n^{1-o(1)}$ such that every pair of vertices in $U$ has at least $n^{1-o(1)}$ common neighbors. In 2003, using a beautiful construction on hypercube, Kostochka and Sudakov showed that this is tight: one cannot remove the $o(1)$ terms even if the edge density of $G$ is $1/2$. In this paper, we generalize their result from pairs to tuples. To be precise, we show that given every pair of positive integers $p<q$, there is an $n$-vertex graph $G$ for all sufficiently large $n$ with edge density $p/q$ such that any vertex subset $U$ of size $Ω(n)$ contains $q$ vertices, any $p+1$ of which have $o(n)$ common neighbors. The edge density $p/q$ is best possible. Our construction uses isoperimetry and concentration of measure on high dimensional complex spheres.