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arXiv · 2502.08128

Intersecting Families of Spanning Trees

Peter Frankl·Glenn Hurlbert·Ferdinand Ihringer·Andrey Kupavskii·Nathan Lindzey·Karen Meagher·Venkata Raghu Tej Pantangi
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Abstract

A family $\mathcal{F}$ of spanning trees of the complete graph on $n$ vertices $K_n$ is \emph{$t$-intersecting} if any two members have a forest on $t$ edges in common. We prove an Erd\H{o}s--Ko--Rado result for $t$-intersecting families of spanning trees of $K_n$. In particular, we show there exists a constant $C > 0$ such that for all $n \geq C (\log n) t$ the largest $t$-intersecting families are the families consisting of all trees that contain a fixed set of $t$ disjoint edges (as well as the stars on $n$ vertices for $t = 1$). The proof uses the spread approximation technique in conjunction with the Lopsided Lov\'asz Local Lemma.

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Peter Frankl, Glenn Hurlbert, Ferdinand Ihringer, Andrey Kupavskii, Nathan Lindzey, Karen Meagher, Venkata Raghu Tej Pantangi. 2025-02-12. Intersecting Families of Spanning Trees. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.08128

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