Counting intersecting and pairs of cross-intersecting families

Abstract

A family of subsets of $\{1,\dots ,n\}$ is called {\it intersecting} if any two of its sets intersect. A classical result in extremal combinatorics due to Erdős, Ko, and Rado determines the maximum size of an intersecting family of $k$-subsets of $\{1,\dots ,n\}$. In this paper we study the following problem: how many intersecting families of $k$-subsets of $\{1,\dots ,n\}$ are there? Improving a result of Balogh, Das, Delcourt, Liu, and Sharifzadeh, we determine this quantity asymptotically for $n\ge 2k+2+2\sqrt{k\log k}$ and $k\to \infty$. Moreover, under the same assumptions we also determine asymptotically the number of {\it non-trivial} intersecting families, that is, intersecting families for which the intersection of all sets is empty. We obtain analogous results for pairs of cross-intersecting families.