The exact linear Turán number of the sail (Q2121726)

Summary: A hypergraph is linear if any two of its edges intersect in at most one vertex. The sail (or \(3\)-fan) \(F^3\) is the \(3\)-uniform linear hypergraph consisting of \(3\) edges \(f_1\), \(f_2\), \(f_3\) pairwise intersecting in the same vertex \(v\) and an additional edge \(g\) intersecting each \(f_i\) in a vertex different from \(v\). The linear Turán number \(\text{ex}_{\text{lin}}(n, F^3)\) is the maximum number of edges in a \(3\)-uniform linear hypergraph on \(n\) vertices that does not contain a copy of \(F^3\). \textit{Z. Füredi} and \textit{A. Gyárfás} [Am. Math. Mon. 127, No. 3, 263--268 (2020; Zbl 1433.05308)] proved that if \(n = 3k\), then \(\text{ex}_{\text{lin}}(n, F^3) = k^2\) and the only extremal hypergraphs in this case are transversal designs. They also showed that if \(n = 3k+2\), then \(\text{ex}_{\text{lin}}(n, F^3) = k^2+k\), and the only extremal hypergraphs are truncated designs (which are obtained from a transversal design on \(3k+3\) vertices with \(3\) groups by removing one vertex and all the hyperedges containing it) along with three other small hypergraphs. However, the case when \(n =3k+1\) was left open. In this paper, we solve this remaining case by proving that \(\text{ex}_{\text{lin}}(n, F^3) = k^2+1\) if \(n = 3k+1\), answering a question of Füredi and Gyárfás [loc. cit.]. We also characterize all the extremal hypergraphs. The difficulty of this case is due to the fact that these extremal examples are rather non-standard. In particular, they are not derived from transversal designs like in the other cases.