Conflict-free Hypergraph Matchings and Coverings

Recent work showing the existence of conflict-free almost-perfect hypergraph matchings has found many applications. We show that, assuming certain simple degree and codegree conditions on the hypergraph H and the conflicts to be avoided, a conflict-free almost-perfect matching can be extended to one covering all of the vertices in a particular subset of V(H), by using an additional set of edges; in particular, we ensure that our matching avoids all of a further set of conflicts, which may consist of both old and new edges. This setup is useful for various applications, and our main theorem provides a black box which encapsulates many long and tedious calculations, massively simplifying the proofs of results in generalised Ramsey theory.