New Upper Bounds for Equiangular Lines by Pillar Decomposition

We derive a procedure for computing an upper bound on the number of equiangular lines in various Euclidean vector spaces by generalizing the classical pillar decomposition developed by (Lemmens and Seidel, 1973); namely, we use linear algebra and combinatorial arguments to bound the number of vectors within an equiangular set which have inner products of certain signs with a negative clique. After projection and rescaling, such sets are also certain spherical two-distance sets, and semidefinite programming techniques may be used to bound the size. Applying our method, we prove new relative bounds for the angle arccos(1/5). Experiments show that our relative bounds for all possible angles are considerably less than the known SDP bounds for a range of larger dimension r. Our computational results also show an explicit bound on the size of a set of equiangular lines regardless of angle, which is strictly less than the well-known Gerzon's bound if r+2 is not a square of an odd number.