English

Disjoint pairs in set systems with restricted intersection

Combinatorics 2019-08-13 v2

Abstract

The problem of bounding the size of a set system under various intersection restrictions has a central place in extremal combinatorics. We investigate the maximum number of disjoint pairs a set system can have in this setting. In particular, we show that for any pair of set systems (A,B)(\mathcal{A}, \mathcal{B}) which avoid a cross-intersection of size tt, the number of disjoint pairs (A,B)(A, B) with AAA \in \mathcal{A} and BBB \in \mathcal{B} is at most k=0t1(nk)2nk\sum_{k=0}^{t-1}\binom{n}{k}2^{n-k}. This implies an asymptotically best possible upper bound on the number of disjoint pairs in a single tt-avoiding family FP[n]\mathcal{F} \subset \mathcal{P}[n]. We also study this problem when A\mathcal{A}, B[n](r)\mathcal{B} \subset [n]^{(r)} are both rr-uniform, and show that it is closely related to the problem of determining the maximum of the product AB|\mathcal{A}||\mathcal{B}| when A\mathcal{A} and B\mathcal{B} avoid a cross-intersection of size tt, and nn0(r,t)n \ge n_0(r, t).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.06994,
  title  = {Disjoint pairs in set systems with restricted intersection},
  author = {António Girão and Richard Snyder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.06994},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

18 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:25:30.520Z