A new lower bound for the chromatic number of general Kneser hypergraphs

Abstract: A general Kneser hypergraph ${\rm KG}^r(\mathcal{H})$ is an $r$-uniform hypergraph that somehow encodes the edge intersections of a ground hypergraph $\mathcal{H}$. The colorability defect of $\mathcal{H}$ is a combinatorial parameter providing a lower bound for the chromatic number of ${\rm KG}^r(\mathcal{H})$ which is addressed in a series of works by Dol'nikov [Sibirskii Matematicheskii Zhurnal, 1988}], K\v{r}\'{\i}\v{z} [Transaction of the American Mathematical Society, 1992], and Ziegler~[Inventiones Mathematicae, 2002]. In this paper, we define a new combinatorial parameter, the equitable colorability defect of hypergraphs, which provides some common improvements of these works. Roughly speaking, we propose a new lower bound for the chromatic number of general Kneser hypergraphs which substantially improves Ziegler's lower bound. It is always as good as Ziegler's lower bound and we provide several families of hypergraphs for which the difference between these two lower bounds is arbitrary large. This specializes to a substantial improvement of the Dol'nikov-K\v{r}\'{\i}\v{z} lower bound for the chromatic number of general Kneser hypergraphs as well. Furthermore, we prove a result ensuring the existence of a colorful subhypergraph in any proper coloring of general Kneser hypergraphs which strengthens Meunier's result [The Electronic Journal of Combinatorics, 2014].