Embedding bipartite distance graphs under Hamming metric in finite fields (Q6162866)

Let \(\mathbb{F}_q\) be a finite field of order \(q\) and let \(\mathbb{F}_q^n\) be equipped with the Hamming distance. The question investigated in this paper is, for a given graph \(H\), how large the size of \(A\subseteq \mathbb{F}_q^n\) provides that \(A\) contains a positive proportion of all possible isometric copies of \(H\). Let \(\mathrm{ex}(n,H)\) denote the maximum number of edges in an \(n\)-vertex \(H\)-free graph and let \(H_q(x) = x\log_q(q-1) - x\log_qx - (1-x)x\log_q(1-x)\). The first main theorem of the paper asserts the following. Let \(H\) be a bipartite graph with \(\mathrm{ex}(m, H) \le cm\) for some \(c > 0\). Let \(\lambda > 0\) be a sufficiently small real number, \(0 < \beta < 1/2\) and \(1/2 < \gamma < 1 - 1/q\). If \(A\subseteq \mathbb{F}_q^n\) satisfies \(|A| > q^{(1 - \frac{\beta^4(1 - H_q(\gamma))^4}{24})}\), then \(A\) contains an isometric copy of \(H\) whose edges are assigned by the same Hamming distance \(d\), for every integer \(d \in ((\beta + \lambda)n, (\gamma - \lambda)n)\). The second main theorem of the paper asserts that for a given bipartite graph \(H\), if \(A\subseteq \mathbb{F}_q^n\) satisfies \(|A| > q^{(1 - c_6)n}\) for some \(c_6 = c_6(q, H, \alpha)\), then \(A\) contains \(\alpha n\) distinct isometric copies \(H\) for some \(\alpha > 0\). The main techniques used to derive these results are the dependent random choice and a new extension of the modular version of Delsarte's inequality.