On almost Gallai colourings in complete graphs

Abstract: For $t \in \mathbb{N}$, we say that a colouring of $E(K_n)$ is $\textit{almost}$ $t$-$\textit{Gallai}$ if no two rainbow $t$-cliques share an edge. Motivated by a lemma of Berkowitz on bounding the modulus of the characteristic function of clique counts in random graphs, we study the maximum number $\tau_t(n)$ of rainbow $t$-cliques in an almost $t$-Gallai colouring of $E(K_n)$. For every $t \ge 4$, we show that $n^{2-o(1)} \leq \tau_t(n) = o(n^2)$. For $t=3$, surprisingly, the behaviour is substantially different. Our main result establishes that $$\left ( \frac{1}{2}-o(1) \right ) n\log n \le \tau_3(n) = O\big (n^{\sqrt{2}}\log n \big ),$$ which gives the first non-trivial improvements over the simple lower and upper bounds. Our proof combines various applications of the probabilistic method and a generalisation of the edge-isoperimetric inequality for the hypercube.