English

Small 3-fold blocking sets in $\mathrm{PG}(2,p^n)$

Combinatorics 2026-01-01 v1

Abstract

A tt-fold blocking set of the finite Desarguesian plane PG(2,pn)\mathrm{PG}(2,p^n), pp prime, is a set of points meeting each line of the plane in at least tt points. The minimum size of such sets is of interest for numerous reasons; however, even the minimum size of nontrivial blocking sets (i.e. 11-fold blocking sets not containing a line) in PG(2,pn)\mathrm{PG}(2,p^n) is an open question when n5n\geq 5 is odd. For n>1n>1 the conjectured lower bound for this size is (pn+pn(s1)/s+1)(p^n+p^{n(s-1)/s}+1), where pn/sp^{n/s} is the size of the largest proper subfield of Fpn\mathbb{F}_{p^n}. Since the union of tt pairwise disjoint nontrivial blocking sets is a tt-fold blocking set, it is conjectured that when pn/sp^{n/s} is large enough w.r.t. tt, then the minimum size of a tt-fold blocking set in PG(2,pn)\mathrm{PG}(2,p^n) is t(pn+pn(s1)/s+1)t(p^n+p^{n(s-1)/s}+1). If nn is even, then the decomposition of the plane into disjoint Baer subplanes gives a tt-fold blocking set of this size. However, for odd nn, the existence of such sets is an unsolved problem in most cases. In this paper, we construct 33-fold blocking sets of conjectured size. These blocking sets are obtained as the disjoint union of three linear blocking sets of R\'edei type, and they lie on the same orbit of the projectivity (x:y:z)(z:x:y)(x:y:z)\mapsto (z:x:y).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.24689,
  title  = {Small 3-fold blocking sets in $\mathrm{PG}(2,p^n)$},
  author = {Bence Csajbók and Máté Róbert Kepes and Eszter Robin and Bence Sógor and Sherry Wang and Elias Williams},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.24689},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:46:39.071Z