Supersaturation of Even Linear Cycles in Linear Hypergraphs

A classic result of Erd\H{o}s and, independently, of Bondy and Simonovits says that the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex graph not containing $C_{2k}$, the cycle of length $2k$, is $O(n^{1+1\mathrm{/}k})$. Simonovits established a corresponding supersaturation result for $C_{2k}$‘s, showing that there exist positive constants $C,c$ depending only on $k$ such that every $n$-vertex graph $G$ with $e(G)\ge C{n}^{1+1\mathrm{/}k}$ contains at least $c{\left(\frac{e(G)}{v(G)}\right)}^{2k}$ many copies of $C_{2k}$, this number of copies tightly achieved by the random graph (up to a multiplicative constant). In this paper, we extend Simonovits’ result to a supersaturation result of $r$-uniform linear cycles of even length in $r$-uniform linear hypergraphs. Our proof is self-contained and includes the $r=2$ case. As an auxiliary tool, we develop a reduction lemma from general host graphs to almost-regular host graphs that can be used for other supersaturation problems, and may therefore be of independent interest.