English

Weak saturation of tensor product of cliques

Combinatorics 2026-04-09 v1

Abstract

Given two hypergraphs GG and HH, the weak saturation number wsat(G,H)\operatorname{\mathrm{wsat}}(G,H) is the minimum number of edges in a spanning subhypergraph FF of GG such that the missing edges of FF can be added one at a time so that each added edge creates a copy of HH. In this work, we determine weak saturation numbers for the case when GG and HH are tensor product of cliques, generalizing a result of Moshkovitz and Shapira (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, 2015), who found the exact values of wsat(Kn1,,ndd, Kr1,,rdd)\operatorname{\mathrm{wsat}}(K^d_{n_1,\ldots,n_d},\ K^d_{r_1,\ldots,r_d}). The proof also yields results for colored weak saturation numbers cwsat(G,H)\operatorname{\mathrm{c-wsat}}(G,H) of colored hypergraphs GG and HH, where the colorings of the copies of HH must be compatible with the coloring of GG. We determine these numbers when GG and HH are unions of tensor product of cliques, generalizing a result of Bulavka, Tancer, and Tyomkyn (Combinatorica, 2023), who determined cwsat(Kn1,,ndq,Kr1,,rdq)\operatorname{\mathrm{c-wsat}}(K^q_{n_1,\ldots,n_d}, K^q_{r_1,\ldots,r_d}). Moreover, our proof allows us to generalize a result of Balogh, Bollob\'{a}s, Morris, and Riordan (Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A, 2012) by determining colored weak saturation numbers cwsat(Kn1,,ndd,{Kr1,,rdd}rR)\operatorname{\mathrm{c-wsat}}(K^d_{n_1,\ldots,n_d},\{K^d_{r_1,\ldots,r_d}\}_{\mathbf{r}\in \mathcal{R}}) for an arbitrary family R\mathcal{R}. The quantity cwsat(G,H)\operatorname{\mathrm{c-wsat}}(G,\mathcal{H}) extends colored weak saturation by allowing, at each step, the creation of a colored copy of any hypergraph in the fixed family of hypergraphs H\mathcal{H}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.07109,
  title  = {Weak saturation of tensor product of cliques},
  author = {Nikolai Terekhov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.07109},
  year   = {2026}
}