Stability for t-intersecting families of permutations

Abstract

A family of permutations (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) is said to be (t)-\textit{intersecting} if any two permutations in (\mathcal{A}) agree on at least (t) points, i.e. for any (σ, π\in \mathcal{A}), (|\{i \in [n]: σ(i)=π(i)\}| \geq t). It was recently proved by Friedgut, Pilpel and the author that for (n) sufficiently large depending on (t), a (t)-intersecting family (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) has size at most ((n-t)!), with equality only if (\mathcal{A}) is a coset of the stabilizer of (t) points (or `(t)-coset' for short), proving a conjecture of Deza and Frankl. Here, we first obtain a rough stability result for (t)-intersecting families of permutations, namely that for any (t \in \mathbb{N}) and any positive constant (c), if (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) is a (t)-intersecting family of permutations of size at least (c(n-t)!), then there exists a (t)-coset containing all but at most a (O(1/n))-fraction of (\mathcal{A}). We use this to prove an exact stability result: for (n) sufficiently large depending on (t), if (\mathcal{A} \subset S_{n}) is a (t)-intersecting family which is not contained within a (t)-coset, then (\mathcal{A}) is at most as large as the family \mathcal{D} & = & \{σ\in S_{n}: σ(i)=i \forall i \leq t, σ(j)=j \textrm{for some} j > t+1\} && \cup \{(1 t+1),(2 t+1),...,(t t+1)\} which has size ((1-1/e+o(1))(n-t)!). Moreover, if (\mathcal{A}) is the same size as (\mathcal{D}) then it must be a `double translate' of (\mathcal{D}), meaning that there exist (π,τ\in S_{n}) such that (\mathcal{A}=π\mathcal{D} τ). We also obtain an analogous result for (t)-intersecting families in the alternating group (A_{n}).

28 pages