Turán Problems on Non-Uniform Hypergraphs

A non-uniform hypergraph H = (V,E) consists of a vertex set V and an edge set E ⊆ 2V ; the edges in E are not required to all have the same cardinality. The set of all cardinalities of edges in H is denoted by R(H), the set of edge types. For a fixed hypergraph H, the Turán density π(H) is defined to be limn→∞maxGn hn(Gn), where the maximum is taken over all H-free hypergraphs Gn on n vertices satisfying R(Gn) ⊆ R(H), and hn(Gn), the so called Lubell function, is the expected number of edges in Gn hit by a random full chain. This concept, which generalizes the Turán density of k-uniform hypergraphs, is motivated by recent work on extremal poset problems. The details connecting these two areas will be revealed in the end of this paper. Several properties of Turán density, such as supersaturation, blow-up, and suspension, are generalized from uniform hypergraphs to non-uniform hypergraphs. Other questions such as “Which hypergraphs are degenerate?” are more complicated and don’t appear to generalize well. In addition, we completely determine the Turán densities of {1, 2}-hypergraphs.