English

Poset saturation of unions of chains

Combinatorics 2025-11-04 v2

Abstract

A family G\mathcal{G} of sets is a(n induced) copy of a poset P=(P,)P=(P,\leqslant) if there exists a bijection b:PGb:P\rightarrow \mathcal{G} such that pqp\leqslant q holds if and only if b(p)b(q)b(p)\subseteq b(q). The induced saturation number sat(n,P)^*(n,P) is the minimum size of a family F2[n]\mathcal{F}\subseteq 2^{[n]} that does not contain any copy of PP, but for any G2[n]FG\in 2^{[n]}\setminus \mathcal{F}, the family F{G}\mathcal{F}\cup \{G\} contains a copy of PP. We consider sat(n,P)^*(n,P) for posets PP that are formed by pairwise incomparable chains, i.e. P=j=1mCijP=\bigoplus_{j=1}^mC_{i_j}. We make the following two conjectures: (i) sat(n,P)=O(n)^*(n,P)=O(n) for all such posets and (ii) sat(n,P)=O(1)^*(n,P)=O(1) if not all chains are of the same size. (The second conjecture is known to hold if there is a unique longest among the chains.) We verify these conjectures in some special cases: we prove (i) if all chains are of the same length, we prove (ii) in the first unknown general case: for posets 2Ck+C12C_k+C_1. Finally, we give an infinite number of examples showing that (ii) is not a necessary condition for sat(n,P)=O(1)^*(n,P)=O(1) among posets P=j=1mCijP=\bigoplus_{j=1}^mC_{i_j}: we prove sat(n,((2tt)+1)C2)=O(1)^*(n,(\binom{2t}{t}+1)C_2)=O(1) for all t1t\ge 1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.23128,
  title  = {Poset saturation of unions of chains},
  author = {Shengjin Ji and Balázs Patkós and Erfei Yue},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.23128},
  year   = {2025}
}