English

Admissable sets do not exist for all parameters

Combinatorics 2024-03-04 v1

Abstract

A cap set in F3n\mathbb{F}_3^n is a subset that contains no three elements adding to 0. Building on a construction of Edel, a recent paper of Tyrrell gave the first improvement to the lower bound for a size of a cap set in two decades showing that, for large enough nn, there is always a cap set in F3n\mathbb{F}_3^n of size at least 2.218n2.218^n. This was shown by constructing what is called an I(11,7)I(11,7) admissible set. An admissible set is a subset of {0,1,2}m\{0,1,2\}^m such that the supports of the vectors form an antichain with respect to inclusion and each triple of vectors has some coordinate where either exactly one of them is non-zero or exactly two are and they have different values. Such an admissible set is said to be I(m,w)I(m,w) if it is of size (mw)\binom mw and all of the vectors have exactly ww non-zero elements. In Tyrrell's paper they conjectured that I(m,w)I(m,w) admissible set exists for all parameters. We resolve this conjecture by showing that there exists an NN such that an I(N,4)I(N,4) admissible set does not exist. We refer to the type of a vector in {0,1,2}m\{0,1,2\}^m is the ordered sequence of its non-zero coefficients. The vectors of type 1212 form an I(m,2)I(m,2) admissible set and the vectors of type 121121 form an I(m,3)I(m,3) admissible set (as can be easily checked by an interested reader). Sadly it is quite easily proved that there is no I(6,4)I(6,4) admissible set where all vectors are of the same type. It follows by Ramsey's Theorem applied to 4-regular hypergraphs that there exists an NN such that an I(N,4)I(N,4) admissible set does not exist. A similar argument shows that there exists an NN' such that an I(N,N2)I(N',N'-2) admissible set does not exist. Since we can construct an I(m1,w)I(m-1,w) and an I(m1,w1)I(m-1,w-1) admissible set from an I(m,w)I(m,w) admissible set, it follows that there are only finitely many I(m,w)I(m,w) admissible sets exist other than the known forms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.00478,
  title  = {Admissable sets do not exist for all parameters},
  author = {Luke Pebody},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.00478},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:05:50.109Z