Bounded-Degree Spanning Trees in Randomly Perturbed Graphs

Abstract

We show that for any fixed dense graph $G$ and bounded-degree tree $T$ on the same number of vertices, a modest random perturbation of $G$ will typically contain a copy of $T$. This combines the viewpoints of the well-studied problems of embedding trees into fixed dense graphs and into random graphs, and extends a sizable body of existing research on randomly perturbed graphs. Specifically, we show that there is $c=c(\alpha,\Delta)$ such that if $G$ is an $n$-vertex graph with minimum degree at least $\alpha n$, and $T$ is an $n$-vertex tree with maximum degree at most $\Delta$, then if we add $cn$ uniformly random edges to $G$, the resulting graph will contain $T$ asymptotically almost surely (as $n\to\infty$). Our proof uses a lemma concerning the decomposition of a dense graph into superregular pairs of comparable sizes, which may be of independent interest.