On a conjecture regarding the product version of the Hilton-Milner theorem

Recently, Frankl and Wang considered a product version of the classical Hilton-Milner theorem. They conjectured that, if $\mathcal{F} \subset \binom{[n]}{k}$ and $\mathcal{G} \subset \binom{[n]}{\ell}$ are non-trivial cross-intersecting families with $n \geq 2k > 2\ell \geq 4$, the maximum of $|\mathcal{F}||\mathcal{G}|$ is attained by the natural Hilton-Milner-type configurations. In this paper, we present two main results concerning this conjecture. Firstly, we show that the conjecture does not hold in general. By introducing a two-center construction, we prove that for every fixed integer $\ell \geq 3$ and all sufficiently large $k$, the conjecture is false in a linear range $2k+1 \leq n \leq (c_\ell - \epsilon)k$ for any $0 < \epsilon < c_\ell - 2$, where $c_\ell > 2$ is an explicit constant. Secondly, we prove that the conjecture holds when $n > 100\ell k^2$ and $3 \leq \ell < k$, and we completely characterize the extremal families. Our proofs rely on the size of minimal covers and analyzing the structural properties of $2$-cover graphs.