Monochromatic components with many edges in random graphs

Abstract

In an $r$-coloring of edges of the complete graph on $n$ vertices, how many edges are there in the largest monochromatic connected component? A construction of Gy\'arf\'as shows that for infinitely many values of $r$, there exist colorings where all monochromatic components have at most $\left(\frac{1}{r^2-r}+o(1)\right)\binom{n}{2}$ edges. Conlon, Luo, and Tyomkyn conjectured that components with at least this many edges are attainable for all $r \ge 3$. This was proven by Luo for $r=3$, along with a lower bound of $\frac{1}{r^2-r+\frac54}{n\choose 2}$ for all $r\ge 2$, and by Conlon, Luo, and Tyomkyn for $r=4$. In this paper, we look at extensions of this problem where the graph being $r$-colored is a sparse random graph or a graph of high minimum degree. By extending several intermediate technical results from previous work in the complete graph setting, we prove analogues of the bound for general $r$ in both the sparse random setting and the high minimum degree setting, as well as the bound for $r=3$ in the latter setting.