Strong Turán stability

Abstract

We study the behaviour of $K_{r+1}$-free graphs $G$ of almost extremal size, that is, typically, $e(G)=ex(n,K_{r+1})-O(n)$. We show that such graphs must have a large amount of 'symmetry', in particular that all but very few vertices of $G$ must have twins. As a corollary, we obtain a new, short proof of a theorem of Simonovits on the structure of extremal graphs with $\omega (G)\le r$ and $\chi (G)\ge k$ for fixed $k\ge r\ge 2$.

18 pages