On Cliques and Lagrangians of 3-uniform Hypergraphs

There is a remarkable connection between the maximum clique number and the Lagrangian of a graph given by T. S. Motzkin and E.G. Straus in 1965. This connection and its extensions were successfully employed in optimization to provide heuristics for the maximum clique number in graphs. It is useful in practice if similar results hold for hypergraphs. In this paper, we explore evidences that the Lagrangian of a 3-uniform hypergraph is related to the order of its maximum cliques when the number of edges of the hypergraph is in certain range. In particular, we present some results about a conjecture introduced by Y. Peng and C. Zhao (2012) and describe a combinatorial algorithm that can be used to check the validity of the conjecture.