Stability for t-intersecting families of permutations

TL;DR

This paper establishes stability results for t-intersecting families of permutations, showing that large families are close to specific structured families, and characterizes the maximal such families in symmetric and alternating groups.

Contribution

It provides the first rough and exact stability results for t-intersecting permutation families, characterizing near-maximal families and their structure.

Findings

Large t-intersecting families are close to a t-coset structure.

Maximal non-coset families are bounded in size by a specific family .

Exact characterization of families attaining maximal size, including their structure and symmetries.

Abstract

A family of permutations (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) is said to be (t)-\textit{intersecting} if any two permutations in (\mathcal{A}) agree on at least (t) points, i.e. for any (\sigma, \pi \in \mathcal{A}), (|\{i \in [n]: \sigma(i)=\pi(i)\}| \geq t). It was recently proved by Friedgut, Pilpel and the author that for (n) sufficiently large depending on (t), a (t)-intersecting family (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) has size at most ((n-t)!), with equality only if (\mathcal{A}) is a coset of the stabilizer of (t) points (or `(t)-coset' for short), proving a conjecture of Deza and Frankl. Here, we first obtain a rough stability result for (t)-intersecting families of permutations, namely that for any (t \in \mathbb{N}) and any positive constant (c), if (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) is a (t)-intersecting family of permutations of size at least (c(n-t)!), then there exists a (t)-coset containing all but at most a (O(1/n))-fraction of (\mathcal{A}). We use this to prove an exact stability result: for (n) sufficiently large depending on (t), if (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) is a (t)-intersecting family which is not contained within a (t)-coset, then (\mathcal{A}) is at most as large as the family \mathcal{D} & = & \{\sigma \in S_{n}: \sigma(i)=i \forall i \leq t, \sigma(j)=j \textrm{for some} j > t+1\} && \cup \{(1 t+1),(2 t+1),...,(t t+1)\} which has size ((1-1/e+o(1))(n-t)!). Moreover, if (\mathcal{A}) is the same size as (\mathcal{D}) then it must be a `double translate' of (\mathcal{D}), meaning that there exist (\pi,\tau \in S_{n}) such that (\mathcal{A}=\pi \mathcal{D} \tau). We also obtain an analogous result for (t)-intersecting families in the alternating group (A_{n}).