A lower bound on the average degree forcing a minor

Abstract

We show that for sufficiently large $d$ and for $t\ge d+1$, there is a graph $G$ with average degree $(1-\epsilon )\lambda t\sqrt{\ln d}$ such that almost every graph $H$ with $t$ vertices and average degree $d$ is not a minor of $G$, where $\lambda =0.63817\dots$ is an explicitly defined constant. This generalises analogous results for complete graphs by Thomason (2001) and for general dense graphs by Myers and Thomason (2005). It also shows that an upper bound for sparse graphs by Reed and Wood (2016) is best possible up to a constant factor.