Improved Bounds for Induced Poset Saturation

Abstract

Given a finite poset $\mathcal{P}$, a family $\mathcal{F}$ of elements in the Boolean lattice is induced-$\mathcal{P}$-saturated if $\mathcal{F}$ contains no copy of $\mathcal{P}$ as an induced subposet but every proper superset of $\mathcal{F}$ contains a copy of $\mathcal{P}$ as an induced subposet.  The minimum size of an induced-$\mathcal{P}$-saturated family in the $n$-dimensional Boolean lattice, denoted $\mathrm{sat}^*(n,\mathcal{P})$, was first studied by Ferrara et al. (2017).

Our work focuses on strengthening lower bounds. For the 4-point poset known as the diamond, we prove $\mathrm{sat}^*(n,\Diamond)\geq\sqrt{n}$, improving upon a logarithmic lower bound. For the antichain with $k+1$ elements, we prove $$\mathrm{sat}^*(n,\mathcal{A}_{k+1})\geq \left(1-\frac{1}{\log_2k}\right)\frac{kn}{\log_2 k}$$ for $n$ sufficiently large, improving upon a lower bound of $3n-1$ for $k\geq 3$.