High Beer Index Implies Big Hollow Triangles

Abstract

The visibility graph of a set S ⊆ ℝ² is the graph whose vertices are the points of S, with two points x,y connected by an edge if and only if they see each other in S, that is, if the segment xy is contained in S. The edge density of this graph is known as the Beer index of S. 
Previously, it has been shown that a simply connected set S ⊆ ℝ² of unit Lebesgue measure with Beer index β > 0 contains a convex subset of measure Ω(β); in particular, for visibility graphs of simply connected sets, a positive edge density β > 0 implies the existence of a clique containing an Ω(β)-fraction of all vertices. The simple-connectivity assumption cannot be omitted, as there are non-simply-connected sets with Beer index 1 and no convex subset of positive measure.
Nevertheless, in this paper, we extend the above result to non-simply-connected sets, by showing that a visibility graph with large edge density contains a triangle with large convex hull. More precisely, we show that a set S ⊆ ℝ² of unit Lebesgue measure with Beer index β > 0 contains three pairwise visible points whose convex hull has measure Ω(β⁹). If in addition S is an open domain with K holes, then S contains three pairwise visible points with convex hull of measure Ω(β/K) as well as a convex subset of measure Ω(β/K²).