Poset saturation of unions of chains

TL;DR

This paper investigates the induced saturation number for posets formed by unions of chains, proposing conjectures and verifying them in specific cases, including new results for certain poset structures.

Contribution

It introduces conjectures on the growth of the induced saturation number for unions of chains and verifies these conjectures in several special cases, including new bounds for specific posets.

Findings

sat^*(n,P) is O(n) when all chains are of the same length

sat^*(n,P) is O(1) if not all chains are of the same size in certain cases

Counterexamples show conditions where sat^*(n,P) remains O(1) despite not all chains being different sizes

Abstract

A family $\mathcal{G}$ of sets is a(n induced) copy of a poset $P=(P,\leqslant)$ if there exists a bijection $b:P\rightarrow \mathcal{G}$ such that $p\leqslant q$ holds if and only if $b(p)\subseteq b(q)$. The induced saturation number sat$^*(n,P)$ is the minimum size of a family $\mathcal{F}\subseteq 2^{[n]}$ that does not contain any copy of $P$, but for any $G\in 2^{[n]}\setminus \mathcal{F}$, the family $\mathcal{F}\cup \{G\}$ contains a copy of $P$. We consider sat$^*(n,P)$ for posets $P$ that are formed by pairwise incomparable chains, i.e. $P=\bigoplus_{j=1}^mC_{i_j}$. We make the following two conjectures: (i) sat$^*(n,P)=O(n)$ for all such posets and (ii) sat$^*(n,P)=O(1)$ if not all chains are of the same size. (The second conjecture is known to hold if there is a unique longest among the chains.) We verify these conjectures in some special cases: we prove (i) if all chains are of the same length, we prove (ii) in the first unknown general case: for posets $2C_k+C_1$. Finally, we give an infinite number of examples showing that (ii) is not a necessary condition for sat$^*(n,P)=O(1)$ among posets $P=\bigoplus_{j=1}^mC_{i_j}$: we prove sat$^*(n,(\binom{2t}{t}+1)C_2)=O(1)$ for all $t\ge 1$.