Dense circuit graphs and the planar Turán number of a cycle

Abstract

The planar Turán number of a graph is the maximum number of edges in an ‐vertex planar graph without as a subgraph. Let denote the cycle of length . The planar Turán number is known for . We show that dense planar graphs with a certain connectivity property (known as circuit graphs) contain large near triangulations, and we use this result to obtain consequences for planar Turán numbers. In particular, we prove that there is a constant so that for all and . When this bound is tight up to the constant and proves a conjecture of Cranston, Lidický, Liu, and Shantanam.