Hypergraphs with many extremal configurations

Abstract

For every positive integer $t$ we construct a finite family of triple systems ${\mathcal M}_t$, determine its Tur\'{a}n number, and show that there are $t$ extremal ${\mathcal M}_t$-free configurations that are far from each other in edit-distance. We also prove a strong stability theorem: every ${\mathcal M}_t$-free triple system whose size is close to the maximum size is a subgraph of one of these $t$ extremal configurations after removing a small proportion of vertices. This is the first stability theorem for a hypergraph problem with an arbitrary (finite) number of extremal configurations. Moreover, the extremal hypergraphs have very different shadow sizes (unlike the case of the famous Tur\'an tetrahedron conjecture). Hence a corollary of our main result is that the boundary of the feasible region of ${\mathcal M}_t$ has exactly $t$ global maxima.