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I know that from this answer to a question on the class NPC, that NPC is not in general closed under intersection and union. However, the answer used languages which form trivial languages under these set operations and trivial languages are of course not NP-complete. If the intersection or union is non-trivial, does the result still hold? Also, I'm also wondering about the Cartesian product of two NP-complete languages since that is another set operation.

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Ari
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Non-trivial sets formed from the unions and intersections of NP-complete sets are also not necessarily NP-complete (of course this is all under the assumption that P != NP).

Let $L$ be a NP-complete language, $A$ be any set in P, and $B:= {\{0,1\}}^*$. Then the following sets are all NP-complete since they are just the disjoint unions of a sets based on $L$, $A$, and $B$.

$L_1 := 00L \cup 01A$

$L_2 := 11L \cup 01A$

$L_3 := 01L \cup 10B$

$L_4 := 10L \cup 01B$

Then $L_1 \cap L_2 = 01A$ and $L_3 \cup L_4 = 01B \cup 10B$ These results are both in P and and non-trivial sets.

On the other hand, as mentioned in a comment above, the Cartesian product of two NP-complete sets is always NP-complete: If $X$ and $Y$ are two NP-complete sets then $X \times Y$ is in NP since a NP-witness for $(x,y) \in X \times Y$ is simply a witness for $x \in X$ along with a witness for $y \in Y$. Furthermore, the map $x \rightarrow (x,y_0)$ is a polynomial time reduction from $X$ to $X \times Y$ where $y_0$ is a fixed member of $Y$.

Ari
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