English

The Exact Saturation Number for the Diamond

Combinatorics 2026-04-09 v1

Abstract

What is the smallest size of a family of subsets of [n][n] such that it does not contain an induced copy of Q2Q_2 as a poset (known as the \textit{diamond}), but adding a new set creates such a copy? It is easy to see that a maximal chain has this property, and thus the answer is at most n+1n+1. Despite the simplicity of the diamond structure, the lower bound stagnated at n\sqrt n for quite some time, until recently the authors obtained a linear lower bound. In this paper, we fully solve this question showing that such a family must have size at least n+1n+1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.06521,
  title  = {The Exact Saturation Number for the Diamond},
  author = {Maria-Romina Ivan and Sean Jaffe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.06521},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:58:25.780Z