Shadows of Uniform Hypergraphs under a Minimum Degree Condition

TL;DR

This paper investigates the structure of extremal hypergraphs under minimum degree conditions, extending previous results to general parameters using novel hypergraph transformations.

Contribution

It introduces a hypergraph transformation combining shifting and compression to identify extremal hypergraphs containing specific cliques for broader parameters.

Findings

Existence of extremal hypergraphs with isolated cliques under certain size conditions.

Extension of previous results from specific cases to general hypergraph parameters.

Development of a new hypergraph transformation technique.

Abstract

Given a set $X$ and an integer $t$, let $\mathcal{F}$ be a family of $k$-subsets of $X$. The Kruskal--Katona theorem states that if $|\mathcal{F}|\geq \binom{t}{k}$, then $|\partial_\ell\mathcal{F}|\geq\binom{t}{\ell}$. The minimum degree version of this problem asks: if $\delta(\mathcal{F})\geq \binom{t}{k-1}$, how small can $|\partial_\ell\mathcal{F}|$ be? We call a hypergraph \textit{extremal} if it achieves the minimum value of $|\partial_\ell \mathcal{F}|$ subject to the degree condition $\delta(\mathcal{F}) \geq \binom{t}{k-1}$. F\"uredi and Zhao [SIAM J. Discrete Math. 36(4), 2022] proved that for $k=3$ and $\ell=2$, every extremal graph contains an isolated copy of $K_{t+1}^3$ when $|X| > \frac{1}{4}(t+1)^2(t+2)$. In this article, we study the general case $k > \ell \geq 2$. By developing a hypergraph transformation that combines shifting operations with antilexicographic compression, we prove that there exists an extremal hypergraph containing an isolated copy of $K^{k}_{t+1}$ whenever $|X| > \frac{1}{4}(t+1)^2\binom{t-1}{\ell-2} + 2t$.