Structure and properties of large cross-intersecting families

Abstract: The study of intersecting families, initiated by Erdős, Ko, and Rado, is a central topic in extremal combinatorics. A classical stability result of Hilton and Milner determines the largest non-trivial intersecting family, and in subsequent works researchers developed structural stability results via the notion of diversity. In this paper, we study cross-intersecting families. We establish a structural theorem for large cross-intersecting pairs, extending Kupavskii's theorem from intersecting families to the cross-intersecting setting. Our result characterizes extremal cross-intersecting pairs in terms of their diversity parts and maximal cross-intersecting extensions. As corollaries, we obtain cross-intersecting analogues of several classical theorems, including those of Han--Kohayakawa and Huang--Peng. A key ingredient in the proof is a new shifting method, called the $S_{U,V}^{Q}$-shift, which not only preserves global intersection properties but also maintains certain local substructures after shifting. We expect this method to be useful elsewhere, and it is already one of the key tools in establishing a product analogue of the Hilton--Milner theorem.