Cycles of given lengths in hypergraphs

Abstract: In this paper, we develop a method for studying cycle lengths in hypergraphs. Our method is built on earlier ones used in [21,22,18]. However, instead of utilizing the well-known lemma of Bondy and Simonovits [4] that most existing methods do, we develop a new and very simple lemma in its place. One useful feature of the new lemma is its adaptiveness for the hypergraph setting. Using this new method, we prove a conjecture of Verstra\"ete [37] that for $r\ge 3$, every $r$-uniform hypergraph with average degree $\Omega(k^{r-1})$ contains Berge cycles of $k$ consecutive lengths. This is sharp up to the constant factor. As a key step and a result of independent interest, we prove that every $r$-uniform linear hypergraph with average degree at least $7r(k+1)$ contains Berge cycles of $k$ consecutive lengths. In both of these results, we have additional control on the lengths of the cycles, which therefore also gives us bounds on the Tur\'an numbers of Berge cycles (for even and odd cycles simultaneously). In relation to our main results, we obtain further improvements on the Tur\'an numbers of Berge cycles and the Zarankiewicz numbers of even cycles. We will also discuss some potential further applications of our method.