On a spectral booksize problem fo non bipartite graphs

Abstract

The $\text{bk}(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the maximum number of triangles sharing a common edge. Motivated by a classical conjecture of Erdős, spectral lower bounds for the booksize have received considerable attention. For a positive divisor $s$ of $m-1$ with $\frac{m-1}{s}\ge2$, let $S_{m,s}^{+}$ be obtained from $K_{s,\frac{m-1}{s}}$ by adding one edge inside the part of order $\frac{m-1}{s}$. Zhai et al. proved that, apart from this explicit family, every $m$-edge non-bipartite graph satisfying $ρ(G)^2\ge m-1+\frac{2}{ρ(G)-1}$ has booksize greater than $\frac{1}{240}\sqrt{m}$, and they asked for the best possible constant. We answer this question asymptotically. For every $0<\varepsilon<\frac{1}{4}$ and all sufficiently large $m$, every $m$-edge non-bipartite graph $G$ without isolated vertices satisfying the same spectral condition either is isomorphic to $S_{m,s}^{+}$ for some such integer $s$, or satisfies $\text{bk}(G)>\left(\frac{1}{4}-\varepsilon\right)\sqrt{m}$. We also give infinitely many graphs outside the exceptional family showing that no constant larger than $\frac{1}{4}$ is possible. Thus $\frac{1}{4}$ is the optimal asymptotic constant in the problem of Zhai et al.