The Hall ratio of a graph G is the maximum value of v(H)/α(H) taken over all non-null subgraphs H ⊆ G. For any graph, the Hall ratio is a lower-bound on its fractional chromatic number. In this note, we present various constructions of graphs whose fractional chromatic number grows much faster than their Hall ratio. This refutes a conjecture of Harris.
For a real constant α, let
$\pi _3^\alpha (G)$
be the minimum of twice the number of K2’s plus α times the number of K3’s over all edge decompositions of G into copies of K2 and K3, where Kr denotes the complete graph on r vertices. Let
$\pi _3^\alpha (n)$
be the maximum of
$\pi _3^\alpha (G)$
over all graphs G with n vertices.
The extremal function
$\pi _3^3(n)$
was first studied by Győri and Tuza (Studia Sci. Math. Hungar.22 (1987) 315–320). In recent progress on this problem, Král’, Lidický, Martins and Pehova (Combin. Probab. Comput.28 (2019) 465–472) proved via flag algebras that
$\pi _3^3(n) \le (1/2 + o(1)){n^2}$
. We extend their result by determining the exact value of
$\pi _3^\alpha (n)$
and the set of extremal graphs for all α and sufficiently large n. In particular, we show for α = 3 that Kn and the complete bipartite graph
${K_{\lfloor n/2 \rfloor,\lceil n/2 \rceil }}$
are the only possible extremal examples for large n.
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