Regular Graphs with Many Triangles are Structured

<jats:p>We compute the leading asymptotics of the logarithm of the number of $d$-regular graphs having at least a fixed positive fraction $c$ of the maximum possible number of triangles, and provide a strong structural description of almost all such graphs.&#x0D; When $d$ is constant, we...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Van der Hoorn, Pim, Lippner, Gabor, Mossel, Elchanan
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mathematics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/145810
Description
Summary:<jats:p>We compute the leading asymptotics of the logarithm of the number of $d$-regular graphs having at least a fixed positive fraction $c$ of the maximum possible number of triangles, and provide a strong structural description of almost all such graphs.&#x0D; When $d$ is constant, we show that such graphs typically consist of many disjoint $(d+1)$-cliques and an almost triangle-free part. When $d$ is allowed to grow with $n$, we show that such graphs typically consist of very dense sets of size $d+o(d)$ together with an almost triangle-free part.&#x0D; This confirms a conjecture of Collet and Eckmann from 2002 and considerably strengthens their observation that the triangles cannot be totally scattered in typical instances of regular graphs with many triangles.</jats:p>