An approximate version of Sidorenko's conjecture

David Conlon, Jacob Fox, Benny Sudakov

Published 2010-04-23, updated 2010-06-08Version 2

A beautiful conjecture of Erd\H{o}s-Simonovits and Sidorenko states that if H is a bipartite graph, then the random graph with edge density p has in expectation asymptotically the minimum number of copies of H over all graphs of the same order and edge density. This conjecture also has an equivalent analytic form and has connections to a broad range of topics, such as matrix theory, Markov chains, graph limits, and quasirandomness. Here we prove the conjecture if H has a vertex complete to the other part, and deduce an approximate version of the conjecture for all H. Furthermore, for a large class of bipartite graphs, we prove a stronger stability result which answers a question of Chung, Graham, and Wilson on quasirandomness for these graphs.