On Spherical Designs of Some Harmonic Indices

Abstract

A finite subset $Y$ on the unit sphere $S^{n-1} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ is called a spherical design of harmonic index $t$, if the following condition is satisfied: $\sum_{\mathbf{x}\in Y}f(\mathbf{x})=0$ for all real homogeneous harmonic polynomials $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ of degree $t$. Also, for a subset $T$ of $\mathbb{N} = \{1,2,\cdots \}$, a finite subset $Y \subseteq S^{n-1}$ is called a spherical design of harmonic index $T,$ if $\sum_{\mathbf{x}\in Y}f(\mathbf{x})=0$ is satisfied for all real homogeneous harmonic polynomials $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ of degree $k$ with $k\in T$.

In the present paper we first study Fisher type lower bounds for the sizes of spherical designs of harmonic index $t$ (or for harmonic index $T$). We also study `tight' spherical designs of harmonic index $t$ or index $T$. Here `tight' means that the size of $Y$ attains the lower bound for this Fisher type inequality. The classification problem of tight spherical designs of harmonic index $t$ was started by Bannai-Okuda-Tagami (2015), and the case $t = 4$ was completed by Okuda-Yu (2016). In this paper we show the classification (non-existence) of tight spherical designs of harmonic index 6 and 8, as well as the asymptotic non-existence of tight spherical designs of harmonic index $2e$ for general $e\geq 3$. We also study the existence problem for tight spherical designs of harmonic index $T$ for some $T$, in particular, including index $T = \{8,4\}$.