Tur\'an numbers of Berge trees

Abstract

A classical conjecture of Erd\H{o}s and S\'os asks to determine the Tur\'an number of a tree. We consider variants of this problem in the settings of hypergraphs and multi-hypergraphs. In particular, for all $k$ and $r$, with $r \ge k (k-2)$, we show that any $r$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ with more than $\frac{n(k-1)}{r+1}$ hyperedges contains a Berge copy of any tree with $k$ edges different from the $k$-edge star. This bound is sharp when $r+1$ divides $n$ and for such values of $n$ we determine the extremal hypergraphs.