On intersecting families of subgraphs of perfect matchings

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fuentes, Melissa M., Kamat, Vikram
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Fuentes, Melissa M.
Kamat, Vikram
author_facet Fuentes, Melissa M.
Kamat, Vikram
contents The seminal Erdős--Ko--Rado (EKR) theorem states that if $\mathcal{F}$ is a family of $k$-subsets of an $n$-element set $X$ for $k\leq n/2$ such that every pair of subsets in $\mathcal{F}$ has a nonempty intersection, then $\mathcal{F}$ can be no bigger than the trivially intersecting family obtained by including all $k$-subsets of $X$ that contain a fixed element $x\in X$. This family is called the star centered at $x$. In this paper, we formulate and prove an EKR theorem for intersecting families of subgraphs of the perfect matching graph, the graph consisting of $n$ disjoint edges. This can be considered a generalization not only of the aforementioned EKR theorem but also of a signed variant of it, first stated by Meyer (1974), and proved separately by Deza--Frankl (1983) and Bollobás--Leader (1997). The proof of our main theorem relies on a novel extension of Katona's beautiful cycle method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_12289
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On intersecting families of subgraphs of perfect matchings
Fuentes, Melissa M.
Kamat, Vikram
Combinatorics
05D05 (Primary), 05C35 (Secondary)
The seminal Erdős--Ko--Rado (EKR) theorem states that if $\mathcal{F}$ is a family of $k$-subsets of an $n$-element set $X$ for $k\leq n/2$ such that every pair of subsets in $\mathcal{F}$ has a nonempty intersection, then $\mathcal{F}$ can be no bigger than the trivially intersecting family obtained by including all $k$-subsets of $X$ that contain a fixed element $x\in X$. This family is called the star centered at $x$. In this paper, we formulate and prove an EKR theorem for intersecting families of subgraphs of the perfect matching graph, the graph consisting of $n$ disjoint edges. This can be considered a generalization not only of the aforementioned EKR theorem but also of a signed variant of it, first stated by Meyer (1974), and proved separately by Deza--Frankl (1983) and Bollobás--Leader (1997). The proof of our main theorem relies on a novel extension of Katona's beautiful cycle method.
title On intersecting families of subgraphs of perfect matchings
topic Combinatorics
05D05 (Primary), 05C35 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12289