It suffices to prove the assertion after replacing by : that replacement gives a tighter interval. Thus assume and , and put
At , let count isolated vertices in . The same indicator random variable calculation as for all isolated vertices gives
By the Chebyshev inequality, with high probability. Since eventually, the marked vertices are then not all connected.
At , the logarithmic-regime giant component result applies with and any fixed . Its unique giant component misses vertices. On the event that it misses at most twice that number, exchangeability makes the missed vertex set uniform conditional on its size. A union bound therefore gives
Thus all of is connected at with high probability.
For the uniform random graph process, assign uniform labels to the edges of the complete graph as independent random variables and reveal them in label order. The binomial random graph is the prefix containing the labels at most , where has a binomial distribution with parameters and . Its variance at is , whereas the gap between and the relevant endpoint is . The Chebyshev inequality gives and with high probability, with harmless integer rounding. The monotone graph property that all marked vertices are connected now implies
The marked-set connectivity threshold is lower than the threshold for connecting every vertex, because only about specified vertices need to avoid the small graph components.
Put and . The hypothesis implies . For the number of isolated vertices, the isolated vertices in the Erdős-Rényi model formulas give
Thus the Chebyshev inequality gives with high probability, uniformly over the specified range.
The Cayley formula supplies a spanning tree on any connected vertex set. Consequently the expected value of the number of graph components of order is bounded by
Choose a fixed with . For , with , the binomial coefficient bound gives
Here . The geometric series and a union bound therefore exclude this entire size range, since . For , an empty graph cut would be necessary. Its total probability is at most
There are consequently no graph components of orders between and , with high probability.
For each fixed , a graph component containing a graph cycle has a spanning tree and at least one extra edge. Counting that extra edge gives an expected value ; hence every small graph component is a tree component. The total number of vertices in tree components of orders satisfies
The Markov inequality gives with high probability. When , this sum is empty and . Since , the remaining vertices must lie in one graph component larger than . It is unique, and its order is . Every other graph component is a tree with at most vertices. This is the logarithmic-regime giant component mechanism: almost all missing vertices are isolated.
Assume , as required for this nontrivial subcritical binomial random graph. Put . A breadth-first exploration of a binomial random graph is dominated by a Galton-Watson process whose offspring counts are independent random variables with law . If its total progeny is at least , the first offspring counts sum to at least . Their moment-generating function is bounded by that of a Poisson distribution of mean . The exponential Markov inequality, optimized at , yields
Taking for any fixed , a union bound over all starting vertices gives .
For the matching lower bound, let count tree components of order . The tree-component expectation in the Erdős-Rényi model is exactly
For , the Stirling formula gives
Choose , with . Then . Distinct overlapping vertex sets cannot both be graph components. For disjoint sets, the joint probability differs from the product only because the between-set edges were counted twice as absent. Thus
It follows that . The second moment method gives with high probability. Combining both bounds, and then taking arbitrarily small fixed , proves the sharp subcritical largest-component scale
Finally the Taylor expansion of gives . The endpoint has no edges and is excluded from this logarithmic asymptotic.
Write , , , and let be the total progeny of a binomial branching process. The preceding binomial branching survival correction gives . For a branching process conditioned on extinction, the offspring probability generating function is , with mean
for sufficiently large . Summing expected generation sizes therefore gives .
Put and let count vertices in graph components of order at least . A breadth-first exploration of a binomial random graph is dominated by . The Markov inequality applied to finite total progeny gives
Always . Since , we have and . Hence . This bound controls the expected value directly, including rare large graph components.
For the lower bound, use the breadth-first exploration of a binomial random graph with unseen vertices, active vertices and explored vertices, starting from , . Let indicate a new root. Conditional on the past, the newly discovered count has a binomial distribution . Put . The unseen-count recursion gives
Here is a martingale. Up to , martingale-difference orthogonality gives , since each conditional variance is at most and is bounded.
Take . Then , and . The Doob L2 maximal inequality implies
The Taylor expansion, uniformly for , gives . Thus throughout the integer interval for large . The new-root sum is nonnegative, so on the preceding event throughout this interval. No graph component finishes there: all these explored vertices belong to one graph component, of order at least , with high probability. Its expected value is therefore at least . Combining both inequalities proves
The barely-supercritical largest-component expectation uses both a positive exploration window and a finite-progeny bound; a bare convergence-in-probability assertion would not by itself justify this expectation.
The persistence of unsampled graph components prevents the mass from each size band from disappearing entirely before . More precisely, a band containing at least vertices retains at least vertices in that same band after at most steps, with high probability, for a fixed depending only on . To see why, each initial graph component in that band has a fixed positive probability that none of the offered edge endpoints touches it during the interval. Such a graph component remains unchanged regardless of the selection rule. The McDiarmid inequality concentrates the total mass of these untouched graph components. The reusable lemma supplies the full uniform-in-starting-time argument, including the version that samples absent edges.
Choose finitely many disjoint bands , , with . Part (i) provides at least vertices in band at its time . Each interval from that time to has length at most , so persistence leaves at least vertices in every one of these disjoint bands at the common time . A union bound over this fixed finite number of bands makes all the conclusions simultaneous. Their total exceeds , a contradiction. No fixed two-choice Achlioptas rule satisfies the explosive percolation hypothesis.
This continuity of fixed-choice percolation is the fixed-choice obstruction proved by Riordan and Warnke; their original research paper also treats a broader class of rules. The argument here does not apply when the number of offered choices grows with .
We need independent sets in every sufficiently large remaining induced subgraph, rather than just one in the initial random graph. The useful concentration variable is the maximum edge-disjoint clique packing in the complement graph; changing one edge changes that variable by at most one. This avoids the much larger sensitivity of the ordinary clique count in a binomial random graph.
First work in a binomial random graph , take , and let count its -cliques. Put and let be its maximum edge-disjoint clique packing size. Form the clique conflict graph whose vertices are these cliques, adjacent when they share an edge. If counts unordered conflicting pairs, the Caro-Wei bound gives, for each realization,
To verify the bound, randomly order the vertices of a finite graph and retain each vertex preceding all its graph neighbours. These retained vertices are an independent set, with expected size by the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Interpret the ratio as zero when . A second application of the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, now to expectations, gives
Counting ordered pairs of -sets with common vertices, including identical sets when , yields
The shared edges account for the factor . We claim
Here are the estimates, including the large overlaps. For , the probability that a random -set contains any specified elements is at most . Summing over their choices inside the first -set gives
The logarithm of is a convex function, a quadratic in , so the maximum on this interval is at an endpoint. We have . As , the other endpoint satisfies
and is smaller than for sufficiently large . Summing at most terms gives .
For the other half of the overlaps, write , where . The exact identity and an upper bound are
The quantity in parentheses is , which tends to zero. The geometric series is thus at most for sufficiently large . This proves the claim. In fact and , so eventually
Now expose the independent edge indicators one at a time. The edge-exposure martingale starts at and ends at . Deleting one edge destroys at most one member of any edge-disjoint clique packing. Hence changing one indicator changes by at most one; coupling the remaining indicators shows .
Precisely, the Azuma-Hoeffding inequality says that if is a martingale and almost surely for deterministic , then, for ,
If all , the martingale is constant. Applying the lower-tail inequality with and gives
for sufficiently large . This is the only martingale concentration inequality needed.
Return to the original binomial random graph and set . For each fixed -element vertex set , the complement graph of has distribution . The union bound therefore gives
since . Thus with high probability every vertex set of size at least contains an independent set of size
Apply greedy colouring by removing independent sets: remove such an independent set, give it a fresh colour, and repeat while at least vertices remain. Give each of the fewer than final vertices its own colour. This uses at most
colours, since . Together with the lower bound, this gives the chromatic number of the half-density binomial random graph:
Throughout this question the binomial random graph has , as fixed in the introduction. Let and . Count the -vertex independent sets by a random variable . Linearity of expectation gives
For the second inequality, implies . For the limit, grows faster than . By the first moment method, with high probability there is no such independent set; any larger independent set would contain one. Thus the independence number satisfies with high probability.
Every class of a proper graph coloring is an independent set, giving the claimed chromatic lower bound:
Let count the copies of the complete graph in the binomial random graph . By linearity of the expected value and independence of distinct edges,
Throughout, is sufficiently large that . We have , and .
First, since ,
The first moment method proves .
For the existence of a -clique, put and . Since ,
This alone is insufficient: we must control the variance via the overlap formula for the variance of a clique count. Let indicate that a given -set spans a clique. If , the two copies share edges, so
For their edge sets are disjoint and the covariance vanishes, even when they share one vertex. Counting ordered pairs of -sets gives the exact formula
This includes the diagonal case .
To bound the overlap factor, regard it as the probability that a uniformly chosen -set intersects a fixed in exactly vertices. A union bound over the possible specified -subsets of yields
Here is a falling factorial, and the last bound holds for . Therefore
For , the concave quadratic is minimized at an endpoint. Its endpoint values are and , both at least . Thus every power of in the last sum is at most , and
because the logarithm of its numerator is . The second moment method, or Chebyshev's inequality directly, gives . Finally, every larger clique contains a -clique, so the absence of excludes all larger sizes. The clique number is exactly with high probability:
Put . For any fixed with , let count copies of the cycle graph in . Then
Pairs of distinct -cycles are dependent only when they share an edge. Classifying them by their common paths gives
The first Janson inequality therefore gives
for an absolute and all sufficiently large . Choose so that . A union bound over the at most choices of shows that, with high probability, every set of at least vertices contains a .
Now greedily choose vertex-disjoint -cycles until none remains. If fewer than were chosen, they would cover fewer than vertices, leaving more than vertices and hence another . This contradiction proves that the greedy packing contains at least vertex-disjoint copies.
Use sprinkling of a binomial random graph to write , where the rounds are independent,
and is chosen large enough that . By the given theorem, has a Hamilton cycle with high probability.
Condition on such a cycle. For each , every chord closes one of the two paths around the Hamilton cycle into a cycle of length . There are at least distinct candidate chords, so the probability that supplies none is at most
A union bound over the fewer than lengths shows that all these cycles occur simultaneously with high probability when . The Hamilton cycle itself supplies length , so is pancyclic.
Fix the requested and choose much smaller constants in that order. Apply the Szemerédi regularity lemma with regularity parameter and a sufficiently large lower bound to a largest triangle-free subgraph . Let
be the resulting equitable partition, and form the reduced graph of a regularity partition on by joining and when is -uniform in and has -density at least .
Choose . If contained a triangle, the triangle embedding lemma for regular pairs would give a triangle in . Thus is triangle-free, and Turan theorem gives
Part (c), with error , holds simultaneously for every pair of sets of size at least . Since is bounded independently of , all regularity classes and their halves satisfy this size condition for large . It follows that every cross-pair contains at most edges of . It also gives
take a bipartition of carrying at least half its internal edges and apply the cross-pair estimate.
Now count the edges of . Pairs represented in contribute at most
The exceptional set, the at most irregular pairs, pairs of -density below , and edges inside classes together contribute at most
Choose , then , and finally small enough in terms of . The total is at most
with high probability, as required.
A connected graph on vertices containing at least two cycles has a spanning tree together with at least two further edges. By Cayley formula, the number of labelled spanning trees on a fixed -set is . Hence the first moment method and a union bound show that the probability of such a component of order is at most
where and is absolute. Requiring that the chosen set be a component would only add absent-edge conditions, so omitting them is a valid upper bound.
Therefore
Thus every component in the stated range is either a tree or a unicyclic component with high probability.
The sharp Hamilton cycle threshold for the Erdős-Rényi model says that
only above the window . The hypothesis therefore places above that window. The Hamiltonicity-to-pancyclicity sprinkling principle then says that three independent rounds contain every cycle graph , , with high probability: one round supplies a Hamilton cycle, while the other two supply the chords and short-cycle edges used to obtain all intermediate lengths.
The union of the three rounds has individual edge probability
By the standard monotone coupling, it is a subgraph of . Since being pancyclic is an increasing graph property, the required probability tends to one. If , interpret the latter parameter as , in which case the conclusion is immediate.
Fix positive , and . Suppose a size band of an Achlioptas process contains at least vertices at time . For every fixed , at least of those vertices remain in unchanged graph components throughout the next steps, with high probability, where one may take . This is a deliberately nonoptimal positive constant.
For independent uniform candidate edges, an initial graph component with vertices is untouched if none of the candidate edges meets it. A uniform edge hits it with probability at most . For sufficiently large , , so the expected value of the untouched vertex mass is at least . Replacing one row of two candidate edges can change by at most , because only the initial graph components hit by an old or new endpoint can change status. The McDiarmid inequality therefore makes except on an event of probability , for a positive constant depending only on . An untouched graph component stays unchanged whichever offered edge is selected.
For candidates restricted to absent edges, generate each by an independent uniform proposal stream and reject already present edges. During any interval of steps with present edges, each proposal has rejection probability conditional on the past. The number of rejections is at most except on an event of probability smaller than any inverse power of : if there were rejections among proposals, a union bound over their positions bounds this by . The first proposals are independent and give the previous untouched-mass estimate. Extra proposals can touch at most additional initial graph components, losing only vertices for fixed . This leaves the stated bound. A union bound makes these estimates simultaneous over starting times . They hold through the entire interval, so deterministic or random stopping times within it are allowed.
For fixed in , the largest component of a graph has the displayed order with high probability. A dominating Galton-Watson process gives the tail bound by the exponential Markov inequality. For the lower bound, the tree-component expectation in the Erdős-Rényi model diverges at . The disjoint-set covariance factor and the exclusion of overlaps give relative variance tending to zero, so the second moment method supplies a tree component of that order.