Strong Tur\'an stability

Abstract

We study the behaviour of $K_{r+1}$-free graphs $G$ of almost extremal size, that is, typically, $e(G)=ex(n,K_{r+1})-O(n)$. We show that such graphs must have a large amount of 'symmetry', in particular that all but very few vertices of $G$ must have twins. As a corollary, we obtain a new, short proof of a theorem of Simonovits on the structure of extremal graphs with $\omega(G)\leq r$ and $\chi(G)\geq k$ for fixed $k \geq r \geq 2$.