Turán numbers of Berge trees

Abstract

A classical conjecture of Erdős and Sós asks to determine the Turán number of a tree. We consider variants of this problem in the settings of hypergraphs and multi-hypergraphs. In particular, for all $k$ and $r$, with $r\ge k(k-2)$, we show that any $r$-uniform hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$ with more than $\frac{n(k-1)}{r+1}$ hyperedges contains a Berge copy of any tree with $k$ edges different from the $k$-edge star. This bound is sharp when $r+1$ divides $n$ and for such values of $n$ we determine the extremal hypergraphs.

11 pages, 1 Figure