English

Saturation for Small Antichains

Combinatorics 2023-01-16 v2

Abstract

For a given positive integer kk we say that a family of subsets of [n][n] is kk-antichain saturated if it does not contain kk pairwise incomparable sets, but whenever we add to it a new set, we do find kk such sets. The size of the smallest such family is denoted by sat(n,Ak)\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal A_{k}). Ferrara, Kay, Kramer, Martin, Reiniger, Smith and Sullivan conjectured that sat(n,Ak)=(k1)n(1+o(1))\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal A_{k})=(k-1)n(1+o(1)), and proved this for k4k\leq 4. In this paper we prove this conjecture for k=5k=5 and k=6k=6. Moreover, we give the exact value for sat(n,A5)\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal A_5) and sat(n,A6)\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal A_6). We also give some open problems inspired by our analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.07392,
  title  = {Saturation for Small Antichains},
  author = {Irina Đanković and Maria-Romina Ivan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.07392},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

8 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:17:59.232Z