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What is the largest number $f(d)$ where every graph with average degree at least $d$ contains a subdivision of $K_{f(d)}$? Mader asked this question in 1967 and $f(d) = \Theta(\sqrt{d})$ was proved by Bollob\'as and Thomason and independently by Koml\'os and Szemer\'edi. This is best possible by considering a disjoint union of $K_{d,d}$. However, this example contains a much smaller subgraph with the almost same average degree, for example, one copy of $K_{d,d}$.
In 2017, Liu and Montgomery proposed the study on the parameter $c_{\varepsilon}(G)$ which is the order of the smallest subgraph of $G$ with average degree at least $\varepsilon d(G)$. In fact, they conjectured that for small enough $\varepsilon>0$, every graph $G$ of average degree $d$ contains a clique subdivision of size $\Omega(\min\{d, \sqrt{\frac{c_{\varepsilon}(G)}{\log c_{\varepsilon}(G)}}\})$. We prove that this conjecture holds up to a multiplicative $\min\{(\log\log d)^6,(\log \log c_{\varepsilon}(G))^6\}$-term.
As a corollary, for every graph $F$, we determine the minimum size of the largest clique subdivision in $F$-free graphs with average degree $d$ up to multiplicative polylog$(d)$-term.
This is joint work with Jaehoon Kim, Youngjin Kim, and Hong Liu.
