English

An improved Recursive Construction for Disjoint Steiner Quadruple Systems

Combinatorics 2019-12-11 v1

Abstract

Let D(n)D(n) be the number of pairwise disjoint Steiner quadruple systems. A simple counting argument shows that D(n)n3D(n) \leq n-3 and a set of n3n-3 such systems is called a large set. No nontrivial large set was constructed yet, although it is known that they exist if n2n \equiv 2 or 4 (mod 6)4~(\text{mod}~6) is large enough. When n7n \geq 7 and n1n \equiv 1 or 5 (mod 6)5~(\text{mod}~6), we present a recursive construction and prove a recursive formula on D(4n)D(4n), as follows: D(4n)2n+min{D(2n),2n7}. D(4n) \geq 2n + \min \{D(2n) ,2n-7\}. The related construction has a few advantages over some of the previously known constructions for pairwise disjoint Steiner quadruple systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1912.04489,
  title  = {An improved Recursive Construction for Disjoint Steiner Quadruple Systems},
  author = {Tuvi Etzion and Junling Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.04489},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:40:56.978Z