We prove a tight upper bound on the independence polynomial (and total number of independent sets) of cubic graphs of girth at least 5. The bound is achieved by unions of the Heawood graph, the point line incidence graph of the Fano plane. We also give a tight lower bound on the total number of independent sets of triangle-free cubic graphs. This bound is achieved by unions of the Petersen graph. We conjecture that in fact all Moore graphs are extremal for the scaled number of independent sets in regular graphs of a given minimum girth, maximizing this quantity if their girth is even and minimizing if odd. The Heawood and Petersen graphs are instances of this conjecture, along with complete graphs, complete bipartite graphs, and cycles.
The method has to this point been used for upper and lower bounds on independent sets and matchings in regular graphs @cite_9 @cite_14 @cite_13 , as well as the Widom-Rowlinson model @cite_0 , another statistical physics model with hard constraints. @cite_8 , the method is applied to models with soft constraints, namely the Ising and Potts models on regular graphs, which in the zero-temperature limit' yield extremal bounds on the number of @math -colorings of cubic graphs. See the survey of Zhao @cite_2 for more on extremal problems for regular graphs.
@cite_14 @cite_8 @cite_9 @cite_0 @cite_2 @cite_13
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We prove tight upper and lower bounds on the internal energy per particle (expected number of monochromatic edges per vertex) in the anti-ferromagnetic Potts model on cubic graphs at every temperature and for all @math . This immediately implies corresponding tight bounds on the anti-ferromagnetic Potts partition function. Taking the zero-temperature limit gives new results in extremal combinatorics: the number of @math -colorings of a @math -regular graph, for any @math , is maximized by a union of @math 's. This proves the @math case of a conjecture of Galvin and Tet ali. We prove tight upper bounds on the logarithmic derivative of the independence and matching polynomials of d-regular graphs. For independent sets, this theorem is a strengthening of Kahn's result that a disjoint union of copies of Kd;d maximizes the number of independent sets of a bipartite d-regular graph, Galvin and Tet ali's result that the independence polynomial is maximized by the same, and Zhao's extension of both results to all d-regular graphs. For matchings, this shows that the matching polynomial and the total number of matchings of a d-regular graph are maximized by a union of copies of Kd;d. Using this we prove the asymptotic upper matching conjecture of Friedland, Krop, Lundow, and Markstrom. In probabilistic language, our main theorems state that for all d-regular graphs and all �, the occupancy fraction of the hard-core model and the edge occupancy fraction of the monomer-dimer model with fugacity � are maximized by Kd;d. Our method involves constrained optimization problems over distributions of random variables and applies to all d-regular graphs directly, without a reduction to the bipartite case. Using a variant of the method we prove a lower bound on the occupancy fraction of the hard-core model on any d-regular, vertex-transitive, bipartite graph: the occupancy fraction of such a graph is strictly greater than the occupancy fraction of the unique translationinvariant hard-core measure on the infinite d-regular tree We consider the Widom–Rowlinson model of two types of interacting particles on d -regular graphs. We prove a tight upper bound on the occupancy fraction, the expected fraction of vertices occupied by a particle under a random configuration from the model. The upper bound is achieved uniquely by unions of complete graphs on d + 1 vertices, K d +1 . As a corollary we find that K d +1 also maximizes the normalized partition function of the Widom–Rowlinson model over the class of d -regular graphs. A special case of this shows that the normalized number of homomorphisms from any d -regular graph G to the graph H WR , a path on three vertices with a loop on each vertex, is maximized by K d +1 . This proves a conjecture of Galvin. In this article we propose new methods for computing the asymptotic value for the logarithm of the partition function (free energy) for certain statistical physics models on certain type of finite graphs, as the size of the underlying graph goes to infinity. The two models considered are the hard-core (independent set) model when the activity parameter λ is small, and also the Potts (q-coloring) model. We only consider the graphs with large girth. In particular, we prove that asymptotically the logarithm of the number of independent sets of any r-regular graph with large girth when rescaled is approximately constant if r ≤ 5. For example, we show that every 4-regular n-node graph with large girth has approximately (1.494…)n-many independent sets, for large n. Further, we prove that for every r-regular graph with r ≥ 2, with n nodes and large girth, the number of proper q ≥ r + 1 colorings is approximately @math n, for large n. We also show that these results hold for random regular graphs with high probability (w.h.p.) as well. As a byproduct of our method we obtain simple algorithms for the problem of computing approximately the logarithm of the number of independent sets and proper colorings, in low degree graphs with large girth. These algorithms are deterministic and use certain correlation decay properties for the corresponding Gibbs measures, and its implications to uniqueness of the Gibbs measures on the infinite trees, as well as some simple cavity trick which is well known in the physics and the Markov chain sampling literature.© 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2008 Preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proceedings of the Seventeenth ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 2006. ArXive version.