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A New Bound for the Brown--Erdős--Sós Problem

Let $f(n,v,e)$ denote the maximum number of edges in a $3$-uniform hypergraph not containing $e$ edges spanned by at most $v$ vertices. One of the most influential open problems in extremal combinatorics then asks, for a given number of edges $e \geq 3$, what is the smallest integer $d=d(e)$ so that $f(n,e+d,e) = o(n^2)$? This question has its origins in work of Brown, Erdős and Sós from the early 70's and the standard conjecture is that $d(e)=3$ for every $e \geq 3$. The state of the art result regarding this problem was obtained in 2004 by Sárközy and Selkow, who showed that $f(n,e + 2 + \lfloor \log_2 e \rfloor,e) = o(n^2)$. The only improvement over this result was a recent breakthrough of Solymosi and Solymosi, who improved the bound for $d(10)$ from 5 to 4. We obtain the first asymptotic improvement over the Sárközy--Selkow bound, showing that $$ f(n, e + O(\log e/ \log\log e), e) = o(n^2). $$