Essentially disjoint families, conflict free colorings and Shelah's revised GCH (Q2448972)

This paper deals with almost disjoint families on \(\beth_\omega\) and larger cardinals; the principal result is that if \(\lambda\) and \(\mu\) are cardinals such that \(\mu<\beth_\omega\leq\lambda\) then every subfamily \(\mathcal{A}\) of \([\lambda]^{\beth_\omega}\) that is \(\mu\)-almost disjoint (meaning \(| A\cap B| <\mu\) for different \(A,B\in\mathcal{A}\)) is essentially disjoint, which means that one can turn it into a disjoint family by subtracting from each \(A\in\mathcal{A}\) a set~\(F(A)\) with \(| F(A)| <| A| \). The author also proves that, in general, if every \(\mu\)-almost disjoint family in \([\lambda]^\kappa\) is essentially disjoint then every \(\mu\)-almost disojoint family in \([\lambda]^{\geq\kappa}\) has a conflict-free colouring with \(\kappa\)~colours, that is, a map \(f \colon \lambda\to\kappa\) such that every member of the family takes on some colour exactly once. In particular, this ensures the existence of conflict-free colourings under the conditions of the main result. The proofs rest on Shelah's revised GCH and on a version of his compactness theorem for singular cardinals.