Partite Saturation Problems

Abstract

We look at several saturation problems in complete balanced blow-ups of graphs. We let $H[n]$ denote the blow-up of $H$ onto parts of size $n$ and refer to a copy of $H$ in $H[n]$ as 'partite' if it has one vertex in each part of $H[n]$. We then ask how few edges a subgraph $G$ of $H[n]$ can have such that $G$ has no partite copy of $H$ but such that the addition of any new edge from $H[n]$ creates a partite $H$. When $H$ is a triangle this value was determined by Ferrara, Jacobson, Pfender, and Wenger. Our main result is to calculate this value for $H=K_4$ when $n$ is large. We also give exact results for paths and stars and show that for $2$-connected graphs the answer is linear in $n$ whilst for graphs which are not $2$-connected the answer is quadratic in $n$. We also investigate a similar problem where $G$ is permitted to contain partite copies of $H$ but we require that the addition of any new edge from $H[n]$ creates an extra partite copy of $H$. This problem turns out to be much simpler and we attain exact answers for all cliques and trees.