Octopuses in the Boolean cube: families with pairwise small intersections, part II

Abstract

The problem we consider originally arises from 2-level polytope theory. This class of polytopes generalizes a number of other polytope families. One of the important questions in this filed can be formulated as follows: is it true for a $d$-dimensional 2-level polytope that the product of the number of its vertices and the number of its $d-1$ dimensional facets is bounded by $d2^{d - 1}$? Recently, Kupavskii and Weltge~\cite{Kupavskii2020} settled this question in positive. A key element in their proof is a more general result for families of vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that the scalar product between any two vectors from different families is either $0$ or $1$. Peter Frankl noted that, when restricted to the Boolean cube, the solution boils down to an elegant application of the Harris--Kleitman correlation inequality. Meanwhile, this problem becomes much more sophisticated when we consider several families. Let $\mathcal{F}_1, \ldots, \mathcal{F}_\ell$ be families of subsets of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. We suppose that for distinct $k, k'$ and arbitrary $F_1 \in \mathcal{F}_{k}, F_2 \in \mathcal{F}_{k'}$ we have $|F_1 \cap F_2|\leqslant m.$ We are interested in the maximal value of $|\mathcal{F}_1|\ldots |\mathcal{F}_\ell|$ and the structure of the extremal example. In the previous paper on the topic, the authors found the asymptotics of this product for constant $\ell$ and $m$ as $n$ tends to infinity. However, the possible structure of the families from the extremal example turned out to be very complicated. In this paper, we obtain a strong structural result for the extremal families.