Sharp bounds for decomposing graphs into edges and triangles

Abstract

Abstract 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.