On K s -free subgraphs in K s+k -free graphs and vertex Folkman numbers

Extending the problem of determining Ramsey numbers Erdős and Rogers introduced the following function. For given integers 2 ≤ s < t let f _s,t (n) = min{max{|S|: S ⊆ V (H) and H[S] contains no K _s }}, where the minimum is taken over all K _t -free graphs H of order n. This function attracted a considerable amount of attention but despite that, the gap between the lower and upper bounds is still fairly wide. For example, when t=s+1, the best bounds have been of the form Ω(n ^1/2+o(1)) ≤ f _s,s+1(n) ≤ O(n ^1−ɛ(s)), where ɛ(s) tends to zero as s tends to infinity. In this paper we improve the upper bound by showing that f _s,s+1(n) ≤ O(n ^2/3). Moreover, we show that for every ɛ > 0 and sufficiently large integers 1 ≪ k ≪ s, Ω(n ^1/2−ɛ ) ≤ f _s,s+k (n) ≤ O(n ^1/2+ɛ . In addition, we also discuss some connections between the function f _s,t and vertex Folkman numbers.