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Saturated Subgraphs of the Hypercube

Part of: Graph theory Extremal combinatorics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2016

J. ROBERT JOHNSON  and
TREVOR PINTO
J. ROBERT JOHNSON
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK (e-mail: r.johnson@qmul.ac.uk)
TREVOR PINTO
Affiliation:
School of Mathematical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK (e-mail: r.johnson@qmul.ac.uk)
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Abstract

We say a graph is (Q n ,Q m )-saturated if it is a maximal Q m -free subgraph of the n-dimensional hypercube Q n . A graph is said to be (Q n ,Q m )-semi-saturated if it is a subgraph of Q n and adding any edge forms a new copy of Q m . The minimum number of edges a (Q n ,Q m )-saturated graph (respectively (Q n ,Q m )-semi-saturated graph) can have is denoted by sat(Q n ,Q m ) (respectively s-sat(Q n ,Q m )). We prove that

$$\begin{linenomath}\lim_{n\to\infty}\ffrac{\sat(Q_n,Q_m)}{e(Q_n)}=0,\end{linenomath}$$
for fixed m, disproving a conjecture of Santolupo that, when m=2, this limit is 1/4. Further, we show by a different method that sat(Q n , Q 2)=O(2n ), and that s-sat(Q n , Q m )=O(2n ), for fixed m. We also prove the lower bound
$$\begin{linenomath}\ssat(Q_n,Q_m)\geq \ffrac{m+1}{2}\cdot 2^n,\end{linenomath}$$
thus determining sat(Q n ,Q 2) to within a constant factor, and discuss some further questions.

MSC classification

Primary: 05C35: Extremal problems
Secondary: 05D05: Extremal set theory

Information

Type
Paper
Information
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 52 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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