Hereditary quasirandomness without regularity

Abstract

AbstractA result of Simonovits and Sós states that for any fixed graph H and any ε > 0 there exists δ > 0 such that if G is an n-vertex graph with the property that every S ⊆ V(G) contains pe(H) |S|v(H) ± δ nv(H) labelled copies of H, then G is quasirandom in the sense that every S ⊆ V(G) contains $\frac{1}{2}$p|S|2± ε n2 edges. The original proof of this result makes heavy use of the regularity lemma, resulting in a bound on δ−1 which is a tower of twos of height polynomial in ε−1. We give an alternative proof of this theorem which avoids the regularity lemma and shows that δ may be taken to be linear in ε when H is a clique and polynomial in ε for general H. This answers a problem raised by Simonovits and Sós.