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Completely reducible super-simple designs with block size four and related super-simple packings

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Abstract

A design is said to be super-simple if the intersection of any two blocks has at most two elements. A super-simple design \({\mathcal{D}}\) with point set X, block set \({\mathcal{B}}\) and index λ is called completely reducible super-simple (CRSS), if its block set \({\mathcal{B}}\) can be written as \({\mathcal{B}=\bigcup_{i=1}^{\lambda} \mathcal{B}_i}\), such that \({\mathcal{B}_i}\) forms the block set of a design with index unity but having the same parameters as \({\mathcal{D}}\) for each 1 ≤ i ≤ λ. It is easy to see, the existence of CRSS designs with index λ implies that of CRSS designs with index i for 1 ≤ i ≤ λ. CRSS designs are closely related to q-ary constant weight codes (CWCs). A (v, 4, q)-CRSS design is just an optimal (v, 6, 4)q+1 code. On the other hand, CRSS group divisible designs (CRSSGDDs) can be used to construct q-ary group divisible codes (GDCs), which have been proved useful in the constructions of q-ary CWCs. In this paper, we mainly investigate the existence of CRSS designs. Three neat results are obtained as follows. Firstly, we determine completely the spectrum for a (v, 4, 3)-CRSS design. As a consequence, a class of new optimal (v, 6, 4)4 codes is obtained. Secondly, we give a general construction for (4, 4)-CRSSGDDs with skew Room frames, and prove that the necessary conditions for the existence of a (4, 2)-CRSSGDD of type g u are also sufficient except definitely for \({(g,u)\in \{(2,4),(3,4),(6,4)\}}\). Finally, we consider the related optimal super-simple (v, 4, 2)-packings and show that such designs exist for all v ≥ 4 except definitely for \({v\in \{4,5,6,9\}}\).

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  1. Department of Mathematics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

    Hui Zhang & Gennian Ge

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  1. Hui Zhang
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  2. Gennian Ge
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Correspondence to Gennian Ge.

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Communicated by L. Teirlinck.

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Zhang, H., Ge, G. Completely reducible super-simple designs with block size four and related super-simple packings. Des. Codes Cryptogr. 58, 321–346 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10623-010-9411-y

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