A sharp spectral extremal result for general non-bipartite graphs

Abstract: For a graph family $\mathcal F$, let $\mathrm{ex}(n,\mathcal F)$ and $\mathrm{spex}(n,\mathcal F)$ denote the maximum number of edges and maximum spectral radius of an $n$-vertex $\mathcal F$-free graph, respectively, and let $\mathrm{EX}(n,\mathcal F)$ and $\mathrm{SPEX}(n,\mathcal F)$ denote the corresponding sets of extremal graphs. Wang, Kang, and Xue showed that if $\mathrm{EX}(n,\mathcal F)$ consists of Tur\'an graphs $T_{n,r}$ plus $O(1)$ edges, then $\mathrm{SPEX}(n,\mathcal F)\subseteq\mathrm{EX}(n,\mathcal F)$ for $n$ large enough. Fang, Tait, and Zhai extended this result by showing if $e(T_{n,r})\le\mathrm{ex}(n,\mathcal F) < e(T_{n,r})+\lfloor n/2r\rfloor$ then $\mathrm{SPEX}(n,\mathcal F)\subseteq\mathrm{EX}(n,\mathcal F)$ for $n$ large enough. In this paper we extend the result further and for many values of $r$ we can show that our result is best possible, answering a question of Fang, Tait, and Zhai.