English

Sunflowers and Ramsey problems for restricted intersections

Combinatorics 2025-04-22 v1 Discrete Mathematics Quantum Physics

Abstract

Extremal problems on set systems with restricted intersections have been an important part of combinatorics in the last 70 year. In this paper, we study the following Ramsey version of these problems. Given a set L{0,,k1}L\subseteq \{0,\dots,k-1\} and a family F\mathcal{F} of kk-element sets which does not contain a sunflower with mm petals whose kernel size is in LL, how large a subfamily of F\mathcal{F} can we find in which no pair has intersection size in LL? We give matching upper and lower bounds, determining the dependence on mm for all kk and LL. This problem also finds applications in quantum computing. As an application of our techniques, we also obtain a variant of F\"uredi's celebrated semilattice lemma, which is a key tool in the powerful delta-system method. We prove that one cannot remove the double-exponential dependency on the uniformity in F\"uredi's result, however, we provide an alternative with significantly better, single-exponential dependency on the parameters, which is still strong enough for most applications of the delta-system method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.15264,
  title  = {Sunflowers and Ramsey problems for restricted intersections},
  author = {Barnabás Janzer and Zhihan Jin and Benny Sudakov and Kewen Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.15264},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

23 pages + 7-page appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-28T23:06:07.503Z