The structural conjecture for minimum diamond-saturated families

Let D2\mathcal D_2 denote the diamond poset, and let F\mathcal F be a diamond-saturated family of subsets of [n][n]: it contains no induced copy of D2\mathcal D_2, while adding any missing subset creates one.

Structural conjecture for minimum diamond-saturated families. If

∣F∣=n+1,|\mathcal F|=n+1,

then F\mathcal F is either a maximal chain, the empty set together with all singletons, or the full set together with all complements of singletons. Moreover, if ∅,[n]otinF\emptyset,[n] otin\mathcal F, then

∣F∣≥2n−c,|\mathcal F|\geq 2n-c,

for some universal constant cc.

The paper proves that every diamond-saturated family has size at least n+1n+1, but the structure of families attaining equality is not determined. The asserted classification and the stronger lower bound without ∅\emptyset or [n][n] remain open.

References

Primary source

Maria-Romina Ivan and Sean Jaffe, “The Exact Saturation Number for the Diamond”, arXiv:2604.06521 (2026).

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