Almost covering all the layers of hypercube with multiplicities

Abstract: Given a hypercube $\mathcal{Q}^{n} := {0,1}^{n}$ in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ and $k \in {0, \dots, n}$, the $k$-th layer $\mathcal{Q}^{n}_{k}$ of $\mathcal{Q}^{n}$ denotes the set of all points in $\mathcal{Q}^{n}$ whose coordinates contain exactly $k$ many ones. For a fixed $t \in \mathbb{N}$ and $k \in {0, \dots, n}$, let $P \in \mathbb{R}\left[x_{1}, \dots, x_{n}\right]$ be a polynomial that has zeroes of multiplicity at least $t$ at all points of $\mathcal{Q}^{n} \setminus \mathcal{Q}^{n}_{k}$, and $P$ has zeros of multiplicity exactly $t-1$ at all points of $\mathcal{Q}^{n}_{k}$. In this short note, we show that $$deg(P) \geq \max\left{ k, n-k\right}+2t-2.$$Matching the above lower bound we give an explicit construction of a family of hyperplanes $H_{1}, \dots, H_{m}$ in $\mathbb{R}^{n}$, where $m = \max\left{ k, n-k\right}+2t-2$, such that every point of $\mathcal{Q}^{n}_{k}$ will be covered exactly $t-1$ times, and every other point of $\mathcal{Q}^{n}$ will be covered at least $t$ times. Note that putting $k = 0$ and $t=1$, we recover the much celebrated covering result of Alon and F\"uredi (European Journal of Combinatorics, 1993). Using the above family of hyperplanes we disprove a conjecture of Venkitesh (The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 2022) on exactly covering symmetric subsets of hypercube $\mathcal{Q}^{n}$ with hyperplanes. To prove the above results we have introduced a new measure of complexity of a subset of the hypercube called index complexity which we believe will be of independent interest. We also study a new interesting variant of the restricted sumset problem motivated by the ideas behind the proof of the above result.