Moderate Deviations of Triangle Counts in the Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi Random Graph $G(n,m)$: The Lower Tail

Abstract

Let $N_{\triangle}(G)$ be the number of triangles in a graph $G$. In [14] and [25] (respectively) the following bounds were proved on the lower tail behaviour of triangle counts in the dense Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs $G_m\sim G(n,m)$: \[ \mathbb{P}\big(N_{\triangle}(G_m) \, < \, (1-\delta)\mathbb{E}[N_{\triangle}(G_m)]\big) \,=\, \exp\left(-\Theta\left(\delta^2n^3\right)\right) \qquad \text{if $n^{-3/2}\ll \delta\ll n^{-1}$} \] and \[ \mathbb{P}\big(N_{\triangle}(G_m) \, < \, (1-\delta)\mathbb{E}[N_{\triangle}(G_m)]\big) \,=\, \exp\left(-\Theta(\delta^{2/3}n^2) \right) \qquad \text{if $n^{-3/4} \ll \delta \ll 1$.} \] Neeman, Radin and Sadun [25] also conjectured that the probability should be of the form $\exp\left(-\Theta\left(\delta^2n^3\right)\right)$ in the "missing interval" $n^{-1}\ll \delta\ll n^{-3/4}$. We prove this conjecture. As part of our proof we also prove that some random graph statistics, related to degrees and codegrees, are normally distributed with high probability.