English

Affine groups as flag-transitive and point-primitive automorphism groups of symmetric designs

Group Theory 2024-10-15 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

In this article, we investigate symmetric designs admitting a flag-transitive and point-primitive affine automorphism group. We prove that if an automorphism group GG of a symmetric (v,k,λ)(v,k,\lambda) design with λ\lambda prime is point-primitive of affine type, then G=26:S6G=2^{6}{:}\mathrm{S}_{6} and (v,k,λ)=(16,6,2)(v,k,\lambda)=(16,6,2), or GG is a subgroup of AΓL1(q)\mathrm{A\Gamma L}_{1}(q) for some odd prime power qq. In conclusion, we present a classification of flag-transitive and point-primitive symmetric designs with λ\lambda prime, which says that such an incidence structure is a projective space PG(n,q)\mathrm{PG}(n,q), it has parameter set (15,7,3)(15,7,3), (7,4,2)(7, 4, 2), (11,5,2)(11, 5, 2), (11,6,2)(11, 6, 2), (16,6,2)(16,6,2) or (45,12,3)(45, 12, 3), or v=pdv=p^d where pp is an odd prime and the automorphism group is a subgroup of AΓL1(q)\mathrm{A\Gamma L}_{1}(q).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2409.04790,
  title  = {Affine groups as flag-transitive and point-primitive automorphism groups of symmetric designs},
  author = {Seyed Hassan Alavi and Mohsen Bayat and Ashraf Daneshkhah and Alessandro Montinaro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.04790},
  year   = {2024}
}