A canonical Ramsey theorem with list constraints in random graphs

Abstract

The celebrated canonical Ramsey theorem of Erdős and Rado implies that for a given graph H, if n is sufficiently large then any colouring of the edges of Kn gives rise to copies of H that exhibit certain colour patterns, namely monochromatic, rainbow or lexicographic. We are interested in sparse random versions of this result and the threshold at which the random graph G(n,p) inherits the canonical Ramsey properties of Kn. Our main result here pins down this threshold when we focus on colourings that are constrained by some prefixed lists. This result is applied in an accompanying work of the authors on the threshold for the canonical Ramsey property (with no list constraints) in the case that H is an even cycle.