Spanning trees of 3-uniform hypergraphs

Masbaum and Vaintrob's "Pfaffian matrix tree theorem" implies that counting spanning trees of a 3-uniform hypergraph (abbreviated to 3-graph) can be done in polynomial time for a class of "3-Pfaffian" 3-graphs, comparable to and related to the class of Pfaffian graphs. We prove a complexity result for recognizing a 3-Pfaffian 3-graph and describe two large classes of 3-Pfaffian 3-graphs -- one of these is given by a forbidden subgraph characterization analogous to Little's for bipartite Pfaffian graphs, and the other consists of a class of partial Steiner triple systems for which the property of being 3-Pfaffian can be reduced to the property of an associated graph being Pfaffian. We exhibit an infinite set of partial Steiner triple systems that are not 3-Pfaffian, none of which can be reduced to any other by deletion or contraction of triples. We also find some necessary or sufficient conditions for the existence of a spanning tree of a 3-graph (much more succinct than can be obtained by the currently fastest polynomial-time algorithm of Gabow and Stallmann for finding a spanning tree) and a superexponential lower bound on the number of spanning trees of a Steiner triple system.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure

Hypergraph matchings and designs

We survey some aspects of the perfect matching problem in hypergraphs, with particular emphasis on structural characterisation of the existence problem in dense hypergraphs and the existence of designs.Comment: 19 pages, for the 2018 IC

Pseudorandom hypergraph matchings

A celebrated theorem of Pippenger states that any almost regular hypergraph with small codegrees has an almost perfect matching. We show that one can find such an almost perfect matching which is `pseudorandom', meaning that, for instance, the matching contains as many edges from a given set of edges as predicted by a heuristic argument.Comment: 14 page

Finding an almost perfect matching in a hypergraph avoiding forbidden submatchings

In 1973, Erd\H{o}s conjectured the existence of high girth $(n,3,2)$-Steiner systems. Recently, Glock, K\"{u}hn, Lo, and Osthus and independently Bohman and Warnke proved the approximate version of Erd\H{o}s' conjecture. Just this year, Kwan, Sah, Sawhney, and Simkin proved Erd\H{o}s' conjecture. As for Steiner systems with more general parameters, Glock, K\"{u}hn, Lo, and Osthus conjectured the existence of high girth $(n,q,r)$-Steiner systems. We prove the approximate version of their conjecture. This result follows from our general main results which concern finding perfect or almost perfect matchings in a hypergraph $G$ avoiding a given set of submatchings (which we view as a hypergraph $H$ where $V(H)=E(G)$). Our first main result is a common generalization of the classical theorems of Pippenger (for finding an almost perfect matching) and Ajtai, Koml\'os, Pintz, Spencer, and Szemer\'edi (for finding an independent set in girth five hypergraphs). More generally, we prove this for coloring and even list coloring, and also generalize this further to when $H$ is a hypergraph with small codegrees (for which high girth designs is a specific instance). Indeed, the coloring version of our result even yields an almost partition of $K_n^r$ into approximate high girth $(n,q,r)$-Steiner systems. Our main results also imply the existence of a perfect matching in a bipartite hypergraph where the parts have slightly unbalanced degrees. This has a number of applications; for example, it proves the existence of $\Delta$ pairwise disjoint list colorings in the setting of Kahn's theorem; it also proves asymptotic versions of various rainbow matching results in the sparse setting (where the number of times a color appears could be much smaller than the number of colors) and even the existence of many pairwise disjoint rainbow matchings in such circumstances.Comment: 52 page

The existence of designs via iterative absorption: hypergraph FF-designs for arbitrary FF

We solve the existence problem for $F$-designs for arbitrary $r$-uniform hypergraphs~$F$. This implies that given any $r$-uniform hypergraph~$F$, the trivially necessary divisibility conditions are sufficient to guarantee a decomposition of any sufficiently large complete $r$-uniform hypergraph into edge-disjoint copies of~$F$, which answers a question asked e.g.~by Keevash. The graph case $r=2$ was proved by Wilson in 1975 and forms one of the cornerstones of design theory. The case when~$F$ is complete corresponds to the existence of block designs, a problem going back to the 19th century, which was recently settled by Keevash. In particular, our argument provides a new proof of the existence of block designs, based on iterative absorption (which employs purely probabilistic and combinatorial methods). Our main result concerns decompositions of hypergraphs whose clique distribution fulfills certain regularity constraints. Our argument allows us to employ a `regularity boosting' process which frequently enables us to satisfy these constraints even if the clique distribution of the original hypergraph does not satisfy them. This enables us to go significantly beyond the setting of quasirandom hypergraphs considered by Keevash. In particular, we obtain a resilience version and a decomposition result for hypergraphs of large minimum degree.Comment: This version combines the two manuscripts `The existence of designs via iterative absorption' (arXiv:1611.06827v1) and the subsequent `Hypergraph F-designs for arbitrary F' (arXiv:1706.01800) into a single paper, which will appear in the Memoirs of the AM