Paper detail

$K_{s,t}$-saturated bipartite graphs

An $n$-by-$n$ bipartite graph is $H$-saturated if the addition of any missing edge between its two parts creates a new copy of $H$. In 1964, Erdős, Hajnal and Moon made a conjecture on the minimum number of edges in a $K_{s,s}$-saturated bipartite graph. This conjecture was proved independently by Wessel and Bollobás in a more general, but ordered, setting: they showed that the minimum number of edges in a $K_{(s,t)}$-saturated bipartite graph is $n^2-(n-s+1)(n-t+1)$, where $K_{(s,t)}$ is the "ordered" complete bipartite graph with $s$ vertices in the first color class and $t$ vertices in the second. However, the very natural question of determining the minimum number of edges in the unordered $K_{s,t}$-saturated case remained unsolved. This problem was considered recently by Moshkovitz and Shapira who also conjectured what its answer should be. In this short paper we give an asymptotically tight bound on the minimum number of edges in a $K_{s,t}$-saturated bipartite graph, which is only smaller by an additive constant than the conjecture of Moshkovitz and Shapira. We also prove their conjecture for $K_{2,3}$-saturation, which was the first open case.