The Exact Saturation Number for the Diamond
Combinatorics
2026-04-09 v1
Abstract
What is the smallest size of a family of subsets of such that it does not contain an induced copy of 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 . Despite the simplicity of the diamond structure, the lower bound stagnated at 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 .
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