Snevily's Conjecture about $\mathcal{L}$-intersecting Families on Set Systems and its Analogue on Vector Spaces

Abstract

The classical Erd\H{o}s-Ko-Rado theorem on the size of an intersecting family of $k$-subsets of the set $[n] = \{1, 2, \dots, n\}$ is one of the fundamental intersection theorems for set systems. After the establishment of the EKR theorem, many intersection theorems on set systems have appeared in the literature, such as the well-known Frankl-Wilson theorem, Alon-Babai-Suzuki theorem, and Grolmusz-Sudakov theorem. In 1995, Snevily proposed the conjecture that the upper bound for the size of an $\mathcal{L}$-intersecting family of subsets of $[n]$ is ${{n} \choose {s}}$ under the condition $\max \{l_{i}\} < \min \{k_{j}\}$, where $\mathcal{L} = \{l_{1}, \dots, l_{s}\}$ with $0 \leq l_{1} < \cdots < l_{s}$ and $k_{j}$ are subset sizes in the family. In this paper, we prove that Snevily's conjecture holds for $n \geq {{k^{2}} \choose {l_{1}+1}}s + l_{1}$, where $k$ is the maximum subset size in the family. We then derive an analogous result for $\mathcal{L}$-intersecting families of subspaces of an $n$-dimensional vector space over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_{q}$.