Maximal sets of a given diameter in Hamming cubes

Abstract

A subset of the Hamming cube over $n$-letter alphabet is said to be $d$-maximal if its diameter is $d$, and adding any point increases the diameter. Our main result shows that each $d$-maximal set is either of size at most $(n+o(n))^d$ or contains a non-trivial Hamming ball. The bound of $(n+o(n))^d$ is asymptotically tight. Additionally, we give a non-trivial lower bound on the size of any $d$-maximal set and show that the number of essentially different $d$-maximal sets is finite.