Saturation for Sums of Posets and Antichains
Abstract
Given a finite poset , we say that a family of subsets of is -saturated if does not contain an induced copy of , but adding any other set to creates an induced copy of . The saturation number of is the size of the smallest -saturated family with ground set . The saturation numbers have been shown to exhibit a dichotomy: for any poset, the saturation number is either bounded, or at least . The general conjecture is that in fact, the saturation number for any poset is either bounded, or at least linear. The linear sum of two posets and , dented by , is defined as the poset obtained from a copy of placed completely on top of a copy of . In this paper we show that the saturation number of is always at least linear, for any , and , where is the antichain of size . This is a generalisation of the recent result that the saturation number for the diamond is linear (in that case and are both the single point poset, and ). We also show that, with the exception of chains which are known to have bounded saturation number, the saturation number for all complete multipartite posets is linear.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.10294,
title = {Saturation for Sums of Posets and Antichains},
author = {Maria-Romina Ivan and Sean Jaffe},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.10294},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
16 pages, 4 figures