Giant Component of Random Graphs with Given Degrees

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, October 10, 2025 - 3:15pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Corrine Yap – Georgia Institute of Technology – cyap35@gatech.eduhttps://corrineyap.com/
Organizer
Jiaxi Nie

Given a feasible degree sequence D, we consider the uniform distribution over all graphs with degree sequence D. In 1995, Molloy and Reed gave a criterion for determining the existence of a giant (i.e. linear in n) component for degree sequences satisfying certain technical conditions; in 2018, Joos, Perarnau, Rautenbach, and Reed gave a refined result that applies to essentially all feasible D. In this talk, we work in the "supercritical" regime and uncover the precise structure of the giant component when it exists, obtaining bounds on the diameter and mixing time of the random walk on the giant which are tight up to polylogarithmic factors. Our techniques involve a variation of core-kernel reduction and analysis of the switch Markov chain. Joint work with Louigi Addario-Berry and Bruce Reed.