Extremal Families for the Erdős--Kleitman Problem: The Missing Constructions

Abstract

For integers $n\ge s\ge2$, let $e(n,s)$ be the maximum size of a family $\mathcal F\subseteq2^{[n]}$ with no $s$ pairwise disjoint members. The problem of determining $e(n,s)$, now called the Erdős--Kleitman problem, is closely related to the well-known Erdős matching problem. Frankl and Kupavskii posed a meta-conjecture predicting that the maximum is always attained by a weighted family. Fix $m\ge3$, write $n=ms+c$ with $0\le c 0$, $β=β(m,k)>0$ and an integer $s_0=s_0(m,k)$ such that, for all integers $s\ge s_0$ and all integers $c$ with $0\le c<s$, the only extremal families for $e(n,s)$ are the families $\mathcal H^k(m,s,\ell;A)$ with $A\in\binom{[n]}{a_k}$ whenever $βs^{(k-1)/k}\le c\le αs^{k/(k+1)}$. In particular, this result determines an infinite number of new extremal families for the Erdős--Kleitman problem and verifies the Frankl--Kupavskii meta-conjecture in these ranges. This also provides a quantitative extension of the result of Kupavskii and Sokolov on the extremality of $\mathcal H^1$.