Balancedly splittable Hadamard matrices

Balancedly splittable Hadamard matrices are introduced and studied. A connection is made to the Hadamard diagonalizable strongly regular graphs, maximal equiangular lines set, and unbiased Hadamard matrices. Several construction methods are presented. As an application, commutative association schemes of 4, 5, and 6 classes are constructed.     

Intriguing sets in partial quadrangles

The point‐line geometry known as a partial quadrangle (introduced by Cameron in 1975) has the property that for every point/line non‐incident pair (P, ?), there is at most one line through P concurrent with ?. So in particular, the well‐studied objects known as generalized quadrangles are each partial quadrangles. An intriguing set of a generalized quadrangle is a set of points which induces an equitable partition of size two of the underlying strongly regular graph. We extend the theory of intriguing sets of generalized quadrangles by Bamberg, Law and Penttila to partial quadrangles, which gives insight into the structure of hemisystems and other intriguing sets of generalized quadrangles. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 19:217‐245, 2011     

On a family of highly regular graphs by Brouwer,Ivanov, and Klin

Highly regular graphs for which not all regularities are explainable by symmetries are fascinating creatures. Some of them like, e.g., the line graph of W. Kantor’s non-classical $GQ(5^2,5)$, are stumbling stones for existing implementations of graph isomorphism tests. They appear to be extremely rare and even once constructed it is difficult to prove their high regularity. Yet some of them, like the McLaughlin graph on 275 vertices and Ivanov’s graph on 256 vertices are of profound beauty. This alone makes it an attractive goal to strive for their complete classification or, failing this, at least to get a deep understanding of them. Recently, one of the authors discovered new methods for proving high regularity of graphs. Using these techniques, in this paper we study a classical family of strongly regular graphs, originally discovered by A.E. Brouwer, A.V. Ivanov, and M.H. Klin in the late 80s. We analyse their symmetries and show that they are $(3,5)$-regular but not 2-homogeneous. Thus we promote these graphs to the distinguished club of highly regular graphs with few symmetries.     

Some implications on amorphic association schemes

We give an overview of results on amorphic association schemes. We give the known constructions of such association schemes, and enumerate most such association schemes on up to 49 vertices. Special attention is paid to cyclotomic association schemes. We give several results on when a strongly regular decomposition of the complete graph is an amorphic association scheme. This includes a new proof of the result that a decomposition of the complete graph into three strongly regular graphs is an amorphic association scheme, and the new result that a strongly regular decomposition of the complete graph for which the union of any two relations is again strongly regular must be an amorphic association scheme.     

Strongly regular graphs associated with ternary bent functions

We prove a new characterization of weakly regular ternary bent functions via partial difference sets. Partial difference sets are combinatorial objects corresponding to strongly regular graphs. Using known families of bent functions, we obtain in this way new families of strongly regular graphs, some of which were previously unknown. One of the families includes an example in [N. Hamada, T. Helleseth, A characterization of some {3v₂+v₃,3v₁+v₂,3,3}-minihypers and some [15,4,9;3]-codes with B₂=0, J. Statist. Plann. Inference 56 (1996) 129-146], which was considered to be sporadic; using our results, this strongly regular graph is now a member of an infinite family. Moreover, this paper contains a new proof that the Coulter-Matthews and ternary quadratic bent functions are weakly regular.     

Amorphic association schemes with negative Latin square-type graphs

Applying results from partial difference sets, quadratic forms, and recent results of Brouwer and Van Dam, we construct the first known amorphic association scheme with negative Latin square-type graphs and whose underlying set is a nonelementary abelian 2-group. We give a simple proof of a result of Hamilton that generalizes Brouwer's result. We use multiple distinct quadratic forms to construct amorphic association schemes with a large number of classes.     

Constructions of projective linear codes by the intersection and difference of sets

Projective linear codes are a special class of linear codes whose dual codes have minimum distance at least 3. Projective linear codes with only a few weights are useful in authentication codes, secret sharing schemes, data storage systems and so on. In this paper, two constructions of q-ary linear codes are presented with defining sets given by the intersection and difference of two sets. These constructions produce several families of new projective two-weight or three-weight linear codes. As applications, our projective codes can be used to construct secret sharing schemes with interesting access structures, strongly regular graphs and association schemes with three classes.     

Strongly regular locally <Emphasis Type="Italic">GQ</Emphasis>(4,<Emphasis Type="Italic">t</Emphasis>)-graphs

Amply regular with parameters (v, k, λ, μ) we call an undirected graph with v vertices in which the degrees of all vertices are equal to k, every edge belongs to λ triangles, and the intersection of the neighborhoods of every pair of vertices at distance 2 contains exactly μ vertices. An amply regular diameter 2 graph is called strongly regular. We prove the nonexistence of amply regular locally GQ(4,t)-graphs with (t,μ) = (4, 10) and (8, 30). This reduces the classification problem for strongly regular locally GQ(4,t)-graphs to studying locally GQ(4, 6)-graphs with parameters (726, 125, 28, 20).     

New families of Q-polynomial association schemes

In this paper, we construct the first known infinite family of primitive Q-polynomial schemes which are not generated by distance-regular graphs. To construct these examples, we introduce the notion of a relative hemisystem of a generalized quadrangle with respect to a subquadrangle.     

Association schemes from the action of PGL(2, q) fixing a nonsingular conic in PG(2, q)

The group PGL(2,q) has an embedding into PGL(3,q) such that it acts as the group fixing a nonsingular conic in PG(2,q). This action affords a coherent configuration (q) on the set (q) of non-tangent lines of the conic. We show that the relations can be described by using the cross-ratio. Our results imply that the restrictions ₊(q) and ₋(q) of (q) to the set ₊(q) of secant (hyperbolic) lines and to the set ₋(q) of exterior (elliptic) lines, respectively, are both association schemes; moreover, we show that the elliptic scheme ₋(q) is pseudocyclic.We further show that the coherent configurations (q ²) with q even allow certain fusions. These provide a 4-class fusion of the hyperbolic scheme ₊(q ²), and 3-class fusions and 2-class fusions (strongly regular graphs) of both schemes ₊(q ²) and ₋(q ²). The fusion results for the hyperbolic case are known, but our approach here as well as our results in the elliptic case are new.     

Segre's hemisystem and McLaughlin's graph

An alternative construction of Segre's hemisystem of H(3,9) is provided, as well as an alternative construction of McLauhglin's strongly regular graph srg(275,112,30,56) in terms of Segre hemisystems.     

Using equality in the Krein conditions to prove nonexistence of certain distance-regular graphs

We prove the nonexistence of a distance-regular graph with intersection array {74,54,15;1,9,60} and of distance-regular graphs with intersection arrays

{4r³+8r²+6r+1,2r(r+1)(2r+1),2r²+2r+1;1,2r(r+1),(2r+1)(2r²+2r+1)}