A refined graph container lemma and applications to the hard-core model on bipartite expanders

We establish a refined version of a graph container lemma due to Galvin and discuss several applications related to the hard-core model on bipartite expander graphs. Given a graph $G$ and $\lambda>0$, the hard-core model on $G$ at activity $\lambda$ is the probability distribution $\mu_{G,\lambda}$ on independent sets in $G$ given by $\mu_{G,\lambda}(I)\propto \lambda^{|I|}$. As one of our main applications, we show that the hard-core model at activity $\lambda$ on the hypercube $Q_d$ exhibits a `structured phase' for $\lambda= \Omega( \log^2 d/d^{1/2})$ in the following sense: in a typical sample from $\mu_{Q_d,\lambda}$, most vertices are contained in one side of the bipartition of $Q_d$. This improves upon a result of Galvin which establishes the same for $\lambda=\Omega(\log d/ d^{1/3})$. As another application, we establish a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the hard-core model on a $d$-regular bipartite $\alpha$-expander, with $\alpha>0$ fixed, when $\lambda= \Omega( \log^2 d/d^{1/2})$. This improves upon the bound $\lambda=\Omega(\log d/ d^{1/4})$ due to the first author, Perkins and Potukuchi. We discuss similar improvements to results of Galvin-Tetali, Balogh-Garcia-Li and Kronenberg-Spinka.