A technique for constructing non‐embeddable quasi‐residual designs

We propose a technique for constructing two infinite families of non‐embeddable quasi‐residual designs as soon as one such design satisfying certain conditions exists. The main tools are generalized Hadamard matrices and balanced generalized weighing matrices. Starting with a specific non‐embeddable quasi‐residual 2‐(27,9,4) design, we construct for every positive integer m a non‐embeddable 2‐(3^m,3^m?1,(3^m?1?1)/2)‐design, and, if r_m=(3^m?1)/2 is a prime power, we construct for every positive integer n a non‐embeddable design. For each design in these families, a symmetric design with the corresponding parameters is known to exist. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 10: 160–172, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/jcd.900     

New families of non‐embeddable quasi‐derived designs

The main result in this article is a method of constructing a non‐embeddable quasi‐derived design from a quasi‐derived design and an α‐resolvable design. This method is a generalization of techniques used by van Lint and Tonchev in 14 , 15 and Kageyama and Miao in 8 . As applications, we construct several new families of non‐embeddable quasi‐derived designs. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 16: 263–275, 2008     

Small non‐embeddable quasi‐derived designs

We establish the existence of non‐embeddable quasi‐derived 2‐designs with the parameters (13, 4, 3), (15, 6, 5), and (16, 6, 5). © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 16: 364–372, 2008     

A note on triangle‐free quasi‐symmetric designs

Triangle‐free quasi‐symmetric 2‐ (v, k, λ) designs with intersection numbers x, y; 0<x<y<kand λ>1, are investigated. It is proved that λ?2y ? x ? 3. As a consequence it is seen that for fixed λ, there are finitely many triangle‐free quasi‐symmetric designs. It is also proved that: k?y(y ? x) + x. Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 19:422‐426, 2011     

A Class of 2‐(3n7, 3n−17, (3n−17−1)/2) Designs

Generalized Hadamard matrices are used for the construction of a class of quasi‐residual nonresolvable BIBD's with parameters . The designs are not embeddable as residual designs into symmetric designs if n is even. The construction yields many nonisomorphic designs for every given n ≥ 2, including more than 10¹⁷ nonisomorphic 2‐(63,21,10) designs. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 15: 460–464, 2007     

On quasi‐orthogonal cocycles

We introduce the notion of quasi‐orthogonal cocycle. This is motivated in part by the maximal determinant problem for square ‐matrices of size congruent to 2 modulo 4. Quasi‐orthogonal cocycles are analogous to the orthogonal cocycles of algebraic design theory. Equivalences with new and known combinatorial objects afforded by this analogy, such as quasi‐Hadamard groups, relative quasi‐difference sets, and certain partially balanced incomplete block designs, are proved.     

A Series of Regular Hadamard Matrices

Let p and 2p−1 be prime powers and p ≡ 3 (mod 4). Then there exists a symmetric design with parameters (4p², 2p² − p, p² − p). Thus there exists a regular Hadamard matrix of order 4p².     

Pseudo quasi‐3 designs and their applications to coding theory

We define a pseudo quasi‐3 design as a symmetric design with the property that the derived and residual designs with respect to at least one block are quasi‐symmetric. Quasi‐symmetric designs can be used to construct optimal self complementary codes. In this article we give a construction of an infinite family of pseudo quasi‐3 designs whose residual designs allow us to construct a family of codes with a new parameter set that meet the Grey Rankin bound. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 17: 411–418, 2009     

Ternary codes,biplanes, and the nonexistence of some quasisymmetric and quasi‐3 designs

The dual codes of the ternary linear codes of the residual designs of biplanes on 56 points are used to prove the nonexistence of quasisymmetric 2‐ $\left(56,12,9\right)$ and 2‐ $\left(57,12,11\right)$ designs with intersection numbers 0 and 3, and the nonexistence of a 2‐ $\left(267,57,12\right)$ quasi‐3 design. The nonexistence of a 2‐ $\left(149,37,9\right)$ quasi‐3 design is also proved.     

A series of Siamese twin designs

A {0,±1}-matrix S is called a Siamese twin design sharing the entries of I if S=I+K−L, where I,K,L are nonzero {0,1}-matrices and both I+K and I+L are incidence matrices of symmetric designs with the same parameters. Let p and 2p+3 be prime powers and . We construct a Siamese twin design with parameters (4(p+1)²,2p²+3p+1,p²+p).     

Comments on 3‐blocked designs

This note provides a correction and some additions to a 1999 article by Luigia Berardi and Fulvio Zuanni on blocking 3‐sets in designs. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Combin. Designs 20: 328–331, 2012     

Infinite families of 3‐designs from APN functions

Combinatorial $t$‐designs have nice applications in coding theory, finite geometries, and several engineering areas. A classical method for constructing $t$‐designs is by the action of a permutation group that is $t$‐transitive or $t$‐homogeneous on a point set. This approach produces $t$‐designs, but may not yield $\left(t+1\right)$‐designs. The objective of this paper is to study how to obtain 3‐designs with 2‐transitive permutation groups. The incidence structure formed by the orbits of a base block under the action of the general affine groups, which are 2‐transitive, is considered. A characterization of such incidence structure to be a 3‐design is presented, and a sufficient condition for the stabilizer of a base block to be trivial is given. With these general results, infinite families of 3‐designs are constructed by employing almost perfect nonlinear functions. Some 3‐designs presented in this paper give rise to self‐dual binary codes or linear codes with optimal or best parameters known. Several conjectures on 3‐designs and binary codes are also presented.     

Quasi‐symmetric designs with fixed difference of block intersection numbers

The following results for proper quasi‐symmetric designs with non‐zero intersection numbers x,y and λ > 1 are proved.

• (1) Let D be a quasi‐symmetric design with z = y ? x and v ≥ 2k. If x ≥ 1 + z + z³ then λ < x + 1 + z + z³.
• (2) Let D be a quasi‐symmetric design with intersection numbers x, y and y ? x = 1. Then D is a design with parameters v = (1 + m) (2 + m)/2, b = (2 + m) (3 + m)/2, r = m + 3, k = m + 1, λ = 2, x = 1, y = 2 and m = 2,3,… or complement of one of these design or D is a design with parameters v = 5, b = 10, r = 6, k = 3, λ = 3, and x = 1, y = 2.
• (3) Let D be a triangle free quasi‐symmetric design with z = y ? x and v ≥ 2k, then x ≤ z + z².
• (4) For fixed z ≥ 1 there exist finitely many triangle free quasi‐symmetric designs non‐zero intersection numbers x, y = x + z.
• (5) There do not exist triangle free quasi‐symmetric designs with non‐zero intersection numbers x, y = x + 2.

© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 15: 49–60, 2007     

Finiteness Results in Triangle‐Free Quasi‐Symmetric Designs

Triangle‐free quasi‐symmetric 2‐ designs with intersection numbers ; and are investigated. Possibility of triangle‐free quasi‐symmetric designs with or is ruled out. It is also shown that, for a fixed x and a fixed ratio , there are only finitely many triangle‐free quasi‐symmetric designs. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 00: 1‐6, 2012     

Infinite families of 2‐designs from a class of cyclic codes

Combinatorial $t$‐designs have wide applications in coding theory, cryptography, communications, and statistics. It is well known that the supports of all codewords with a fixed weight in a code may give a $t$‐design. In this paper, we first determine the weight distributions of a class of linear codes derived from the dual of some extended cyclic codes. We then obtain infinite families of 2‐designs and explicitly compute their parameters from the supports of all the codewords with a fixed weight in the codes. By a simple counting argument, we obtain exponentially many 2‐designs.     

Coloring quasi‐line graphs

A graph G is a quasi‐line graph if for every vertex v, the set of neighbors of v can be expressed as the union of two cliques. The class of quasi‐line graphs is a proper superset of the class of line graphs. A theorem of Shannon's implies that if G is a line graph, then it can be properly colored using no more than 3/2 ω(G) colors, where ω(G) is the size of the largest clique in G. In this article, we extend this result to all quasi‐line graphs. We also show that this bound is tight. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory     

A quasi‐symmetric 2‐(49,9,6) design

Huffman and Tonchev discovered four non‐isomorphic quasi‐symmetric 2‐(49,9,6) designs. They arise from extremal self‐dual [50,25,10] codes with a certain weight enumerator. In this note, a new quasi‐symmetric 2‐(49,9,6) design is constructed. This is established by finding a new extremal self‐dual [50,25,10] code as a neighbor of one of the four extremal codes discovered by Huffman and Tonchev. A number of new extremal self‐dual [50,25,10] codes with other weight enumerators are also found. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 10: 173–179, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/jcd.10007     

Disjoint quasi‐kernels in digraphs

A quasi‐kernel in a digraph is an independent set of vertices such that any vertex in the digraph can reach some vertex in the set via a directed path of length at most two. Chvátal and Lovász proved that every digraph has a quasi‐kernel. Recently, Gutin et al. raised the question of which digraphs have a pair of disjoint quasi‐kernels. Clearly, a digraph has a pair of disjoint quasi‐kernels cannot contain sinks, that is, vertices of outdegree zero, as each such vertex is necessarily included in a quasi‐kernel. However, there exist digraphs which contain neither sinks nor a pair of disjoint quasi‐kernels. Thus, containing no sinks is not sufficient in general for a digraph to have a pair of disjoint quasi‐kernels. In contrast, we prove that, for several classes of digraphs, the condition of containing no sinks guarantees the existence of a pair of disjoint quasi‐kernels. The classes contain semicomplete multipartite, quasi‐transitive, and locally semicomplete digraphs. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 58:251‐260, 2008     

Non‐isolated quasi‐degrees

We show that non‐isolated from below 2‐c.e. Q ‐degrees are dense in the structure of c.e. Q ‐degrees. We construct a 2‐c.e. Q ‐degree, which can't be isolated from below not only by c.e. Q ‐degrees, but by any Q ‐degree. We also prove that below any c.e. Q ‐degree there is a 2‐c.e. Q ‐degree, which is non‐isolated from below and from above (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)