Expanders graphs and sieving in combinatorial structures

We prove a general large sieve statement in the context of random walks on subgraphs of a given graph. This can be seen as a generalization of previously known results where one performs a random walk on a group enjoying a strong spectral gap property. In such a context the point is to exhibit a strong uniform expansion property for a suitable family of Cayley graphs on quotients. In our combinatorial approach, this is replaced by a result of Alon–Roichman about expanding properties of random Cayley graphs. Applying the general setting we show e.g., that with high probability (in a strong explicit sense) random coloured subsets of integers contain monochromatic (non-empty) subsets summing to zero, or that a random coloring of the edges of a complete graph contains a monochromatic triangle.