English

Super-regular Steiner 2-designs

Combinatorics 2022-09-21 v2

Abstract

A design is additive under an abelian group GG (briefly, GG-additive) if, up to isomorphism, its point set is contained in GG and the elements of each block sum up to zero. The only known Steiner 2-designs that are GG-additive for some GG have block size which is either a prime power or a prime power plus one. Indeed they are the point-line designs of the affine spaces AG(n,q)AG(n,q), the point-line designs of the projective planes PG(2,q)PG(2,q), and the point-line designs of the projective spaces PG(n,2)PG(n,2). In the attempt to find new examples, possibly with a block size which is neither a prime power nor a prime power plus one, we look for Steiner 2-designs which are strictly GG-additive (the point set is exactly GG) and GG-regular (any translate of any block is a block as well) at the same time. These designs will be called\break "GG-super-regular". Our main result is that there are infinitely many values of vv for which there exists a super-regular, and therefore additive, 22-(v,k,1)(v,k,1) design whenever kk is neither singly even nor of the form 2n3122^n3\geq12. The case k2k\equiv2 (mod 4) is a definite exception whereas k=2n312k=2^n3\geq12 is at the moment a possible exception. We also find super-regular 22-(pn,p,1)(p^n,p,1) designs with p{5,7}p\in\{5,7\} and n3n\geq3 which are not isomorphic to the point-line design of AG(n,p)AG(n,p).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.04588,
  title  = {Super-regular Steiner 2-designs},
  author = {Marco Buratti and Anamari Nakić},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.04588},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

31 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:28:40.467Z