Embedding rooted blow-ups of tree posets

Abstract

A tree poset $T$ is a poset whose Hasse diagram is a tree. Bukh proved that if a family $\mathcal F\subseteq 2^{[n]}$ contains $(h(T)-1+\varepsilon)\binom{n}{\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\rfloor}$ sets, then $\mathcal F$ contains a weak copy of $T$, where $h(T)$ is the height of $T$, the number of elements in a longest chain of $T$. Several strengthenings and generalizations of this result have been obtained. We prove the following robust variant. For a tree poset $T$ and $x\in T$, the $b$-blow-up $T(x,b)$ rooted at $x$ is the tree poset that we obtain from $T$ by replacing every element $u$ by $b^d$ new elements, where $d$ is the distance $d(x,u)$ in the Hasse diagram of $T$ and an edge $uv$ with $v$ being closer to $x$ is replaced by edges such that every new copy of $v$ is joined to $b$ new copies of $u$ such that these new copies form pairwise disjoint sets for the copies of $v$. We prove that for any tree poset $T$, $x\in T$, and $\varepsilon>0$ there exists $\delta$ such that if $\mathcal F\subseteq 2^{[n]}$ contains $(h(T)-1+\varepsilon)\binom{n}{\lfloor \frac{n}{2}\rfloor}$ sets, then $\mathcal F$ contains a weak copy of $T(x,\lfloor \delta n\rfloor)$. This settles a conjecture of Treglown and the author. As applications, we derive the known asymptotic counting and random versions of Bukh's theorem from this stronger embedding result, and obtain new maximal anti-Ramsey results for tree posets.