Cycles are strongly Ramsey-unsaturated

We call a graph H Ramsey-unsaturated if there is an edge in the complement of H such that the Ramsey number r(H) of H does not change upon adding it to H. This notion was introduced by Balister, Lehel and Schelp in [2], where it is shown that cycles (except for C4) are Ramsey-unsaturated, and conjectured that, moreover, one may add any chord without changing the Ramsey number of the cycle Cn, unless n is even and adding the chord creates an odd cycle. We prove this conjecture for large cycles by showing a stronger statement: If a graph H is obtained by adding a linear number of chords to a cycle Cn, then r(H) = r(Cn), as long as the maximum degree of H is bounded, H is either bipartite (for even n) or almost bipartite (for odd n), and n is large. This motivates us to call cycles strongly Ramsey-unsaturated. Our proof uses the regularity method. 1