Subdivisions and near-linear stable sets

Abstract

We prove that for every complete graph $K_t$, all graphs $G$ with no induced subgraph isomorphic to a subdivision of $K_t$ have a stable subset of size at least $|G|/\mathrm{polylog}|G|$. This is close to best possible, because for $t\ge 7$, not all such graphs $G$ have a stable set of linear size, even if $G$ is triangle-free.