Saturation for small antichains (Q2111774)

Summary: For a given positive integer \(k\) we say that a family of subsets of \([n]\) is \(k\)-antichain saturated if it does not contain \(k\) pairwise incomparable sets, but whenever we add to it a new set, we do find \(k\) such sets. The size of the smallest such family is denoted by \(\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal{A}_k)\). Ferrara, Kay, Kramer, Martin, Reiniger, Smith and Sullivan conjectured that \(\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal{A}_k)=(k-1)n(1+o(1))\), and proved this for \(k\leqslant 4\). In this paper we prove this conjecture for \(k=5\) and \(k=6\). Moreover, we give the exact value for \(\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal{A}_5)\) and \(\text{sat}^*(n, \mathcal{A}_6)\). We also give some open problems inspired by our analysis.