On tripartite common graphs

Abstract

A graph H is common if the number of monochromatic copies of H in a 2-edge-colouring of the complete graph K-n is asymptotically minimised by the random colouring. Burr and Rosta, extending a famous conjecture of Erdos, conjectured that every graph is common. The conjectures of Era's and of Burr and Rosta were disproved by Thomason and by Sidorenko, respectively, in the late 1980s. Collecting new examples of common graphs had not seen much progress since then, although very recently a few more graphs were verified to be common by the flag algebra method or the recent progress on Sidorenko's conjecture. Our contribution here is to provide several new classes of tripartite common graphs. The first example is the class of so-called triangle trees, which generalises two theorems by Sidorenko and answers a question of Jagger, Stovicek, and Thomason from 1996. We also prove that, somewhat surprisingly, given any tree T, there exists a triangle tree such that the graph obtained by adding T as a pendant tree is still common. Furthermore, we show that adding arbitrarily many apex vertices to any connected bipartite graph on at most 5 vertices yields a common graph.