The chromatic number of random Borsuk graphs

Abstract

We study a model of random graph where vertices are $n$ i.i.d. uniform random points on the unit sphere $S^d$ in $\mathbb{R}^{d+1}$, and a pair of vertices is connected if the Euclidean distance between them is at least $2- \epsilon$. We are interested in the chromatic number of this graph as $n$ tends to infinity. It is not too hard to see that if $\epsilon > 0$ is small and fixed, then the chromatic number is $d+2$ with high probability. We show that this holds even if $\epsilon \to 0$ slowly enough. We quantify the rate at which $\epsilon$ can tend to zero and still have the same chromatic number. The proof depends on combining topological methods (namely the Lyusternik--Schnirelman--Borsuk theorem) with geometric probability arguments. The rate we obtain is best possible, up to a constant factor --- if $\epsilon \to 0$ faster than this, we show that the graph is $(d+1)$-colorable with high probability.