Dominating sets in projective planes

We describe small dominating sets of the incidence graphs of finite projective planes by establishing a stability result which shows that dominating sets are strongly related to blocking and covering sets. Our main result states that if a dominating set in a projective plane of order $q>81$ is smaller than $2q+2[\sqrt{q}]+2$ (i.e., twice the size of a Baer subplane), then it contains either all but possibly one points of a line or all but possibly one lines through a point. Furthermore, we completely characterize dominating sets of size at most $2q+\sqrt{q}+1$. In Desarguesian planes, we could rely on strong stability results on blocking sets to show that if a dominating set is sufficiently smaller than 3q, then it consists of the union of a blocking set and a covering set apart from a few points and lines.Comment: 19 page

On the stability of small blocking sets

A stability theorem says that a nearly extremal object can be obtained from an extremal one by “small changes”. In this paper, we study the relation of sets having few 0-secants and blocking sets

On the metric dimension of affine planes, biaffine planes and generalized quadrangles

In this paper the metric dimension of (the incidence graphs of) particular partial linear spaces is considered. We prove that the metric dimension of an affine plane of order $q\geq13$ is $3q-4$ and describe all resolving sets of that size if $q\geq 23$. The metric dimension of a biaffine plane (also called a flag-type elliptic semiplane) of order $q\geq 4$ is shown to fall between $2q-2$ and $3q-6$, while for Desarguesian biaffine planes the lower bound is improved to $8q/3-7$ under $q\geq 7$, and to $3q-9\sqrt{q}$ under certain stronger restrictions on $q$. We determine the metric dimension of generalized quadrangles of order $(s,1)$, $s$ arbitrary. We derive that the metric dimension of generalized quadrangles of order $(q,q)$, $q\geq2$, is at least $\max\{6q-27,4q-7\}$, while for the classical generalized quadrangles $W(q)$ and $Q(4,q)$ it is at most $8q$