Minimum Weight Flat Antichains of Subsets

Abstract

Building on classical theorems of Sperner and Kruskal-Katona, we investigate antichains $\mathcal {F}$ in the Boolean lattice B_n of all subsets of $[n]:=\{1,2,\dots ,n\}$, where $\mathcal {F}$ is flat, meaning that it contains sets of at most two consecutive sizes, say $\mathcal {F}=\mathcal {A}\cup {\mathscr{B}}$, where $\mathcal {A}$ contains only k-subsets, while ${\mathscr{B}}$ contains only (k − 1)-subsets. Moreover, we assume $\mathcal {A}$ consists of the first m k-subsets in squashed (colexicographic) order, while ${\mathscr{B}}$ consists of all (k − 1)-subsets not contained in the subsets in $\mathcal {A}$. Given reals α, β > 0, we say the weight of $\mathcal {F}$ is $\alpha \cdot |\mathcal {A}|+\beta \cdot |{\mathscr{B}}|$. We characterize the minimum weight antichains $\mathcal {F}$ for any given n,k,α,β, and we do the same when in addition $\mathcal {F}$ is a maximal antichain. We can then derive asymptotic results on both the minimum size and the minimum Lubell function.