Uniform hypergraphs containing no grids

Abstract

A hypergraph is called an r by r grid if it is isomorphic to a pattern of r horizontal and r vertical lines. Three sets form a triangle if they pairwise intersect in three distinct singletons. A hypergraph is linear if every pair of edges meet in at most one vertex. In this paper we construct large linear r-hypergraphs which contain no grids. Moreover, a similar construction gives large linear r-hypergraphs which contain neither grids nor triangles. For r at least 4 our constructions are almost optimal. These investigations are also motivated by coding theory: we get new bounds for optimal superimposed codes and designs.