English

Multicolor Sunflowers

Combinatorics 2025-01-29 v2

Abstract

A sunflower is a collection of distinct sets such that the intersection of any two of them is the same as the common intersection CC of all of them, and C|C| is smaller than each of the sets. A longstanding conjecture due to Erd\H{o}s and Szemer\'edi states that the maximum size of a family of subsets of [n][n] that contains no sunflower of fixed size k>2k>2 is exponentially smaller than 2n2^n as nn\rightarrow\infty. We consider this problem for multiple families. In particular, we obtain sharp or almost sharp bounds on the sum and product of kk families of subsets of [n][n] that together contain no sunflower of size kk with one set from each family. For the sum, we prove that the maximum is (k1)2n+1+s=nk+2n(ns)(k-1)2^n+1+\sum_{s=n-k+2}^{n}\binom{n}{s} for all nk3n \ge k \ge 3, and for the k=3k=3 case of the product, we prove that it is between (18+o(1))23nand(0.13075+o(1))23n.\left(\frac{1}{8}+o(1)\right)2^{3n}\qquad \hbox{and} \qquad (0.13075+o(1))2^{3n}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.00525,
  title  = {Multicolor Sunflowers},
  author = {Dhruv Mubayi and Lujia Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.00525},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

16 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-22T11:59:11.051Z