English

Maximal antichains of minimum size

Combinatorics 2013-04-11 v3

Abstract

Let n4n\geqslant 4 be a natural number, and let KK be a set K[n]:=1,2,...,nK\subseteq [n]:={1,2,...,n}. We study the problem to find the smallest possible size of a maximal family A\mathcal{A} of subsets of [n][n] such that A\mathcal{A} contains only sets whose size is in KK, and A⊈BA\not\subseteq B for all A,BA{A,B}\subseteq\mathcal{A}, i.e. A\mathcal{A} is an antichain. We present a general construction of such antichains for sets KK containing 2, but not 1. If 3K3\in K our construction asymptotically yields the smallest possible size of such a family, up to an o(n2)o(n^2) error. We conjecture our construction to be asymptotically optimal also for 3∉K3\not\in K, and we prove a weaker bound for the case K=2,4K={2,4}. Our asymptotic results are straightforward applications of the graph removal lemma to an equivalent reformulation of the problem in extremal graph theory which is interesting in its own right.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1206.3007,
  title  = {Maximal antichains of minimum size},
  author = {Thomas Kalinowski and Uwe Leck and Ian T. Roberts},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.3007},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

fixed faulty argument in Section 2, added references

R2 v1 2026-06-21T21:19:02.221Z