High dimensional expanders simultaneously satisfying spectral and combinatorial (coboundary) expansion have recently played a major role in breakthroughs in PCP and coding theory, but the only known construction of such complexes is extremely involved, requiring deep algebraic number theory. In this work, we give an extremely simple combinatorial construction of a sub-polynomial degree complex based on projections of the flags complex (subspace chains) that is (i) a local spectral expander, (ii) a coboundary expander, and (iii) a swap coboundary expander. As a corollary, we also give the first near-linear size combinatorial hypergraphs with good agreement tests in the `1%' regime, and a simple PCP construction with near-linear size.

We consider the problem of linearly ordered (LO) coloring of hypergraphs. A hypergraph has an LO coloring if there is a vertex coloring, using a set of ordered colors, so that (i) no edge is monochromatic, and (ii) each edge has a unique maximum color. It is an open question as to whether or not a 2-LO colorable 3-uniform hypergraph can be LO colored with 3 colors in polynomial time. Nakajima and Živný recently gave a polynomial-time algorithm to color such hypergraphs with $\widetilde{O}(n^{1/3})$ colors and asked if SDP methods can be used directly to obtain improved bounds. Our main result is to show how to use SDP-based rounding methods to produce an LO coloring with $\widetilde{O}(n^{1/5})$ colors for such hypergraphs. We show how to reduce the problem to cases with highly structured SDP solutions, which we call balanced hypergraphs. Then, we discuss how to apply classic SDP-rounding tools to obtain improved bounds.