On orthogonal symmetric chain decompositions

arXiv1810.09847MaRDI QIDQ6308652FDOQ6308652

Authors: Karl Däubel, Sven Jäger, Torsten Mütze, Manfred Scheucher 

Publication date: 23 October 2018

Abstract: The $n$-cube is the poset obtained by ordering all subsets of $1,ldots,n$ by inclusion, and it can be partitioned into $$ chains, which is the minimum possible number. Two such decompositions of the $n$-cube are called orthogonal if any two chains of the decompositions share at most a single element. Shearer and Kleitman conjectured in 1979 that the $n$-cube has $lfloorn/2floor+1$ pairwise orthogonal decompositions into the minimum number of chains, and they constructed two such decompositions. Spink recently improved this by showing that the $n$-cube has three pairwise orthogonal chain decompositions for $ngeq24$. In this paper, we construct four pairwise orthogonal chain decompositions of the $n$-cube for $ngeq60$. We also construct five pairwise edge-disjoint chain decompositions of the $n$-cube for $ngeq90$, where edge-disjointness is a slightly weaker notion than orthogonality.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Edge subsets with special properties (factorization, matching, partitioning, covering and packing, etc.) (05C70) Combinatorics of partially ordered sets (06A07)

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