On Restricted Intersections and the Sunflower Problem

Abstract

A sunflower with $r$ petals is a collection of $r$ sets over a ground set $X$ such that every element in $X$ is in no set, every set, or exactly one set. Erd\H{o}s and Rado \cite{er} showed that a family of sets of size $n$ contains a sunflower if there are more than $n!(r-1)^n$ sets in the family. Alweiss et al. \cite{alwz} and subsequently Rao~\cite{rao} and Bell et al.~\cite{bcw} improved this bound to $(O(r \log(n))^n$. We study the case where the pairwise intersections of the set family are restricted. In particular, we improve the best-known bound for set families when the size of the pairwise intersections of any two sets is in a set $L$. We also present a new bound for the special case when the set $L$ is the nonnegative integers less than or equal to $d$ using the techniques of Alweiss et al. \cite{alwz}.