On 2-(45, 12, 3) designs

Under the assumption that the incidence matrix of a 2-(45, 12, 3) design has a certain block structure, we determine completely the number of nonisomorphic designs involved. We discover 1136 such designs with trivial automorphism group. In addition we analyze all 2-(45, 12, 3) designs having an automorphism of order 5 or 11. Altogether, the total number of nonisomorphic 2-(45, 12, 3) designs found in 3752. Many of these designs are self-dual and each of these self-dual designs possess a polarity. Some have polarities with no absolute points, giving rise to strongly regular (45, 12, 3, 3) graphs. In total we discovered 58 pairwise nonisomorphic strongly regular graphs, one of which has a trivial automorphism group. Further, we analyzed completely all the designs for subdesigns with parameters 2-(12, 4, 3), 2-(9, 3, 3), and 2-(5, 4, 3). In the first case, the number of 2-(12, 4, 3) subdesigns that a design possessed, if non-zero, turned out to be a multiple of 3, whereas 2-(9, 3, 3) subdesigns were so abundant it was more unusual to find a design without them. Finally, in the case of 2-(5, 4, 3) subdesigns there is a design, unique amongst the ones discovered, that has precisely 9 such subdesigns and these form a partition of the point set of the design. This design has a transitive group of automorphisms of order 360. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.