Crux, space constraints and subdivisions

Abstract

The existence of $H$-subdivisions within a graph $G$ has deep connections with topological, structural and extremal properties of $G$. One prominent example of such a connection, due to Bollob\'{a}s and Thomason and independently Koml\'os and Szemer\'edi, asserts that the average degree of $G$ being $d$ ensures a $K_{\Omega(\sqrt{d})}$-subdivision in $G$. Although this square-root bound is the best possible, various results showed that much larger clique subdivisions can be found in a graph for many natural classes. We investigate the connection between crux, a notion capturing the essential order of a graph, and the existence of large clique subdivisions. Our main result gives an asymptotically optimal bound on the size of a largest clique subdivision in a generic graph $G$, which is determined by both its average degree and its crux size. As corollaries, we obtain \begin{itemize} \item a characterisation of extremal graphs for which the square-root bound above is tight: they are essentially a disjoint union of graphs each of which has the crux size linear in $d$; \item a unifying approach to find a clique subdivision of almost optimal size in graphs which do not contain a fixed bipartite graph as a subgraph; \item and that the clique subdivision size in random graphs $G(n,p)$ witnesses a dichotomy: when $p = \omega(n^{-1/2})$, the barrier is the space, while when $p=o( n^{-1/2})$, the bottleneck is the density. \end{itemize}