A spectral Erdős-Faudree-Rousseau theorem

Abstract: A well-known theorem of Mantel states that every $n$-vertex graph with more than $\lfloor n^2/4\rfloor $ edges contains a triangle. An interesting problem in extremal graph theory studies the minimum number of edges contained in triangles among graphs with a prescribed number of vertices and edges. Erd\H{o}s, Faudree and Rousseau (1992) showed that a graph on $n$ vertices with more than $\lfloor n^2/4\rfloor $ edges contains at least $2\lfloor n/2\rfloor +1$ edges in triangles. Such edges are called triangular edges. In this paper, we present a spectral version of the result of Erd\H{o}s, Faudree and Rousseau. Using the supersaturation-stability and the spectral technique, we prove that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with $\lambda (G) \ge \sqrt{\lfloor n^2/4\rfloor}$ contains at least $2 \lfloor {n}/{2} \rfloor -1$ triangular edges, unless $G$ is a balanced complete bipartite graph. The method in our paper has some interesting applications. Firstly, the supersaturation-stability can be used to revisit a conjecture of Erd\H{o}s concerning with the booksize of a graph, which was initially proved by Edwards (unpublished), and independently by Khad\v{z}iivanov and Nikiforov (1979). Secondly, our method can improve the bound on the order $n$ of a graph by dropping the condition on $n$ being sufficiently large, which is obtained from the triangle removal lemma. Thirdly, the supersaturation-stability can be applied to deal with the spectral extremal graph problems on counting triangles, which was recently studied by Ning and Zhai (2023).