Counting triangles in a graph.

combinatoricsgraph theory

I'm trying to solve a problem, and I just need to prove the following lemma (Which I conjectured by myself):

$\forall \alpha >0, \exists \delta >0$ such that if $n$ is big enough, $G$ is a graph on $n$ vertices and $\alpha n^{2}$-far from being triangle-free (that is, you need to remove at least $\alpha n^{2}$ edges to have no triangles), then it has at least $\delta n^{3}$ triangles.

My first idea was to use Erdos-Simonovits Stability theorem (since $\alpha n^{2}$-far from being triangle-free implies $\alpha n^{2}$-far from being bipartite, which implies that $K_{3}(G)\geq\frac{n}{6}(e(g)+\alpha n^{2}-\frac{n^{2}}{4})$. Now it suffices to show that $e(G)\geq \frac{n^{2}}{4}$. Is this true?

Edit: I did not use the actual Erdos-Simonovits Stability theorem, but the first bound it is still true.

Note: For those who are curious, the original problem states: Prove that $\forall \alpha>0, n$ big enough, any $3-uniform$ hypergraph with at least $\alpha n^{2}$ edges has a set of six vertices with at least $3$ edges contained in those vertices.

Best Answer

This is the contrapositive of the triangle removal lemma, which states that

For every $\alpha>0$, there is $\delta>0$ such that if $n$ is large enough and a graph on $n$ vertices has at most $\delta n^3$ triangles, then it is possible to make the graph triangle-free by removing at most $\alpha n^2$ edges.

Usually this is proved using the regularity lemma. In particular, your suggested approach won't work, since (for many values of $\alpha$) there are graphs which are $\alpha n^2$-far from triangle-free but still have fewer than $\frac{n^2}{4}$ edges. For example, take a complete graph on about $2\alpha n$ vertices (this has about $2\alpha n^2$ edges, half of which need to be removed to make the graph triangle-free) and make all other vertices isolated. If it did work, the dependency $\delta = \frac{\alpha}{6}$ would be much stronger than known results, which suggests that it can't be easily fixed.