Triangle-intersecting families of graphs (Q2428720)

Summary: A family \(\mathcal F\) of graphs is triangle-intersecting if for every \(G,H\in\mathcal F, G \cap H\) contains a triangle. A conjecture of Simonovits and Sós from 1976 states that the largest triangle-intersecting families of graphs on a fixed set of \(n\) vertices are those obtained by fixing a specific triangle and taking all graphs containing it, resulting in a family of size \(\frac{1}{8}2^{\binom{n}{2}}\). We prove this conjecture and some generalizations (for example, we prove that the same is true of odd-cycle-intersecting families, and we obtain best possible bounds on the size of the family under different, not necessarily uniform, measures). We also obtain stability results, showing that almost-largest triangle-intersecting families have approximately the same structure.