English

On orthogonal symmetric chain decompositions

Combinatorics 2022-11-15 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The nn-cube is the poset obtained by ordering all subsets of {1,,n}\{1,\ldots,n\} by inclusion, and it can be partitioned into (nn/2)\binom{n}{\lfloor n/2\rfloor} chains, which is the minimum possible number. Two such decompositions of the nn-cube are called orthogonal if any two chains of the decompositions share at most a single element. Shearer and Kleitman conjectured in 1979 that the nn-cube has n/2+1\lfloor n/2\rfloor+1 pairwise orthogonal decompositions into the minimum number of chains, and they constructed two such decompositions. Spink recently improved this by showing that the nn-cube has three pairwise orthogonal chain decompositions for n24n\geq 24. In this paper, we construct four pairwise orthogonal chain decompositions of the nn-cube for n60n\geq 60. We also construct five pairwise edge-disjoint chain decompositions of the nn-cube for n90n\geq 90, where edge-disjointness is a slightly weaker notion than orthogonality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.09847,
  title  = {On orthogonal symmetric chain decompositions},
  author = {Karl Däubel and Sven Jäger and Torsten Mütze and Manfred Scheucher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.09847},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Data and verification files are available on arXiv as ancillary files

R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:49:47.920Z