Extremal Families for the Erdős--Kleitman Problem: The Missing Constructions
Abstract
For integers , let be the maximum size of a family with no pairwise disjoint members. The problem of determining , now called the Erd\H{o}s--Kleitman problem, is closely related to the well-known Erd\H{o}s matching problem. Frankl and Kupavskii posed a meta-conjecture predicting that the maximum is always attained by a weighted family. Fix , write with , and set . For , let . For , define This defines a unified class of weighted families with matching number less than . Among these families, , , and were previously known to be extremal in different ranges of . We show that for , all families are uniquely extremal in some ranges of . More precisely, we prove that for every and every , there exist constants , and an integer such that, for all integers and all integers with , the only extremal families for are the families with whenever . In particular, this result determines an infinite number of new extremal families for the Erd\H{o}s--Kleitman problem and verifies the Frankl--Kupavskii meta-conjecture in these ranges. This also provides a quantitative extension of the result of Kupavskii and Sokolov on the extremality of .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.25611,
title = {Extremal Families for the Erdős--Kleitman Problem: The Missing Constructions},
author = {Cheng Chi and Yan Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.25611},
year = {2026}
}