Cycles with many chords


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Date

2024-08

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

How many edges in an $ n $-vertex graph will force the existence of a cycle with as many chords as it has vertices? Almost 30 years ago, Chen, Erdős and Staton considered this question and showed that any $ n $-vertex graph with $ 2{n}^{3/2} $ edges contains such a cycle. We significantly improve this old bound by showing that $ \Omega \left(n\kern0.2em {\log}^8n\right) $ edges are enough to guarantee the existence of such a cycle. Our proof exploits a delicate interplay between certain properties of random walks in almost regular expanders. We argue that while the probability that a random walk of certain length in an almost regular expander is self-avoiding is very small, one can still guarantee that it spans many edges (and that it can be closed into a cycle) with large enough probability to ensure that these two events happen simultaneously.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

65 (1)

Pages / Article No.

3 - 16

Publisher

Wiley

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

chords; cycles; random walks

Organisational unit

03993 - Sudakov, Benjamin / Sudakov, Benjamin check_circle

Notes

Funding

196965 - Problems in Extremal and Probabilistic Combinatorics (SNF)

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