The Erdős-Rado Sunflower Problem for Vector Spaces

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ihringer, Ferdinand, Kupavskii, Andrey
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ihringer, Ferdinand
Kupavskii, Andrey
author_facet Ihringer, Ferdinand
Kupavskii, Andrey
contents The famous Erdős-Rado sunflower conjecture suggests that an $s$-sun\-flower-free family of $k$-element sets has size at most $(Cs)^k$ for some absolute constant $C$. In this note, we investigate the analog problem for $k$-spaces over the field with $q$ elements. For $s \geq k+1$, we show that the largest $s$-sunflower-free family $\mathcal{F}$ satisfies \[ 1 \leq |\mathcal{F}| / q^{(s-1) \binom{k+1}{2} - k} \leq (q/(q-1))^k. \] For $s \leq k$, we show that \[ q^{-\binom{k+1}{2}} \leq |\mathcal{F}| / q^{(s-1) \binom{k+1}{2} - k} \leq (q/(q-1))^k. \] Our lower bounds rely on an iterative construction that uses lifted maximum rank-distance (MRD) codes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03671
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Erdős-Rado Sunflower Problem for Vector Spaces
Ihringer, Ferdinand
Kupavskii, Andrey
Combinatorics
The famous Erdős-Rado sunflower conjecture suggests that an $s$-sun\-flower-free family of $k$-element sets has size at most $(Cs)^k$ for some absolute constant $C$. In this note, we investigate the analog problem for $k$-spaces over the field with $q$ elements. For $s \geq k+1$, we show that the largest $s$-sunflower-free family $\mathcal{F}$ satisfies \[ 1 \leq |\mathcal{F}| / q^{(s-1) \binom{k+1}{2} - k} \leq (q/(q-1))^k. \] For $s \leq k$, we show that \[ q^{-\binom{k+1}{2}} \leq |\mathcal{F}| / q^{(s-1) \binom{k+1}{2} - k} \leq (q/(q-1))^k. \] Our lower bounds rely on an iterative construction that uses lifted maximum rank-distance (MRD) codes.
title The Erdős-Rado Sunflower Problem for Vector Spaces
topic Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03671