Colored unavoidable patterns and balanceable graphs

Abstract

We study a Tur\'an-type problem on edge-colored complete graphs. We show that for any $r$ and $t$, any sufficiently large $r$-edge-colored complete graph on $n$ vertices with $\Omega(n^{2-1/tr^r})$ edges in each color contains a member from certain finite family $\mathcal{F}_t^r$ of $r$-edge-colored complete graphs. We conjecture that $\Omega(n^{2-1/t})$ edges in each color are sufficient to find a member from ${\mathcal{F}}_t^r$. A result of Gir\~ao and Narayanan confirms this conjecture when $r=2$. Next, we study a related problem where the corresponding Tur\'an threshold is linear. We call an edge-coloring of a path $P_{rk}$ balanced if each color appears $k$ times in the coloring. We show that any $3$-edge-coloring of a large complete graph with $kn+o(n)$ edges in each color contains a balanced $P_{3k}$. This is tight up to a constant factor of $2$. For more colors, the problem becomes surprisingly more delicate. Already for $r=7$, we show that even $n^{2-o(1)}$ edges from each color does not guarantee existence of a balanced $P_{7k}$.