The Erdős-Rado Sunflower Problem for Vector Spaces

Abstract: The famous Erd\H{o}s-Rado sunflower conjecture suggests that an $s$-sun-flower-free family of $k$-element sets has size at most $(Cs)^k$ for some absolute constant $C$. In this note, we investigate the analog problem for $k$-spaces over the field with $q$ elements. For $s \geq k+1$, we show that the largest $s$-sunflower-free family $\mathcal{F}$ satisfies [ 1 \leq |\mathcal{F}| / q^{(s-1) \binom{k+1}{2} - k} \leq (q/(q-1))^k. ] For $s \leq k$, we show that [ q^{-\binom{k}{2}} \leq |\mathcal{F}| / q^{(s-1) \binom{k+1}{2} - k} \leq (q/(q-1))^k. ] Our lower bounds rely on an iterative construction that uses lifted maximum rank-distance (MRD) codes.