Local Shearer bound

Abstract: We prove the following local strengthening of Shearer's classic bound on the independence number of triangle-free graphs: For every triangle-free graph $G$ there exists a probability distribution on its independent sets such that every vertex $v$ of $G$ is contained in a random independent set drawn from the distribution with probability $(1-o(1))\frac{\ln d(v)}{d(v)}$. This resolves the main conjecture raised by Kelly and Postle (2018) about fractional coloring with local demands, which in turn confirms a conjecture by Cames van Batenburg et al. (2018) stating that every $n$-vertex triangle-free graph has fractional chromatic number at most $(\sqrt{2}+o(1))\sqrt{\frac{n}{\ln(n)}}$. Addressing another conjecture posed by Cames van Batenburg et al., we also establish an analogous upper bound in terms of the number of edges. To prove these results we establish a more general technical theorem that works in a weighted setting. As a further application of this more general result, we obtain a new spectral upper bound on the fractional chromatic number of triangle-free graphs: We show that every triangle-free graph $G$ satisfies $\chi_f(G)\le (1+o(1))\frac{\rho(G)}{\ln \rho(G)}$ where $\rho(G)$ denotes the spectral radius. This improves the bound implied by Wilf's classic spectral estimate for the chromatic number by a $\ln \rho(G)$ factor and makes progress towards a conjecture of Harris on fractional coloring of degenerate graphs.