Asymptotic Enumeration and Limit Laws for Multisets: the Subexponential Case

For a given combinatorial class $\mathcal{C}$ we study the class $\mathcal{G} = \mathrm{MSET}(\mathcal{C})$ satisfying the multiset construction, that is, any object in $\mathcal{G}$ is uniquely determined by a set of $\mathcal{C}$-objects paired with their multiplicities. For example, $\mathrm{MSET}(\mathbb{N})$ is just the class of number partitions of positive integers, a prominent and well-studied case. The multiset construction appears naturally in the study of unlabelled objects, for example graphs or various objects related to number partitions. Our main result establishes the asymptotic size of the set $\mathcal{G}_{n,N}$ that contains all multisets in $\mathcal{G}$ having size $n$ and being comprised of $N$ objects from $\mathcal{C}$, as $n$ and $N$ tend to infinity and when the counting sequence of $\mathcal{C}$ is governed by subexponential growth; this is a particularly important setting in combinatorial applications. Moreover, we study the component distribution of typical objects from $\mathcal{G}_{n,N}$ and we discover a unique phenomenon that we baptise extreme condensation: taking away the largest component as well as all the components of the smallest possible size, we are left with an object which converges in distribution as $n, N \rightarrow\infty$. The exact distribution of the limiting object is also retrieved. Moreover and rather surprisingly, in stark contrast to analogous results for labelled objects, the results here hold uniformly in $N$.