Conjecture on extremal sunflower-free families of vector spaces

Let sks\leq k and let qq be a prime power. An ss-sunflower-free family of kk-spaces over the field with qq elements is a family containing no ss members whose pairwise intersections are all equal. Let B(s,k){\mathcal B}(s,k) denote the construction defined earlier in the paper.

Extremal vector-space sunflower conjecture. There exists a constant C=C(q,s)C=C(q,s) such that every ss-sunflower-free family F{\mathcal F} of kk-spaces over the field with qq elements satisfies

FB(s,k)Ck.|{\mathcal F}|\leq |{\mathcal B}(s,k)|\cdot C^k.

The conjecture asserts that the construction B(s,k){\mathcal B}(s,k) is optimal up to an exponential factor in kk. The source motivates it by noting that no better construction is known for the relevant parameters, while the optimality of the chosen nested lifted MRD-code parameters is not clear in general.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Ferdinand Ihringer and Andrey Kupavskii, “The Erdős-Rado Sunflower Problem for Vector Spaces”, arXiv:2505.03671 (2025).

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