Commutative association schemes

Association schemes were originally introduced by Bose and his co-workers in the design of statistical experiments. Since that point of inception, the concept has proved useful in the study of group actions, in algebraic graph theory, in algebraic coding theory, and in areas as far afield as knot theory and numerical integration. This branch of the theory, viewed in this collection of surveys as the "commutative case," has seen significant activity in the last few decades. The goal of the present survey is to discuss the most important new developments in several directions, including Gelfand pairs, cometric association schemes, Delsarte Theory, spin models and the semidefinite programming technique. The narrative follows a thread through this list of topics, this being the contrast between combinatorial symmetry and group-theoretic symmetry, culminating in Schrijver's SDP bound for binary codes (based on group actions) and its connection to the Terwilliger algebra (based on combinatorial symmetry). We propose this new role of the Terwilliger algebra in Delsarte Theory as a central topic for future work.Comment: 36 page

可換アソシエーションスキームの拡張について

Tohoku University田中太初課

Self-orthogonal codes over a non-unital ring and combinatorial matrices

There is a local ring $E$ of order $4,$ without identity for the multiplication, defined by generators and relations as $E=\langle a,b \mid 2a=2b=0,\, a^2=a,\, b^2=b,\,ab=a,\, ba=b\rangle.$ We study a special construction of self-orthogonal codes over $E,$ based on combinatorial matrices related to two-class association schemes, Strongly Regular Graphs (SRG), and Doubly Regular Tournaments (DRT). We construct quasi self-dual codes over $E,$ and Type IV codes, that is, quasi self-dual codes whose all codewords have even Hamming weight. All these codes can be represented as formally self-dual additive codes over \F_4. The classical invariant theory bound for the weight enumerators of this class of codesimproves the known bound on the minimum distance of Type IV codes over $E.$Comment: 18 page

On relative tt-designs in polynomial association schemes

Motivated by the similarities between the theory of spherical $t$-designs and that of $t$-designs in $Q$-polynomial association schemes, we study two versions of relative $t$-designs, the counterparts of Euclidean $t$-designs for $P$- and/or $Q$-polynomial association schemes. We develop the theory based on the Terwilliger algebra, which is a noncommutative associative semisimple $\mathbb{C}$-algebra associated with each vertex of an association scheme. We compute explicitly the Fisher type lower bounds on the sizes of relative $t$-designs, assuming that certain irreducible modules behave nicely. The two versions of relative $t$-designs turn out to be equivalent in the case of the Hamming schemes. From this point of view, we establish a new algebraic characterization of the Hamming schemes.Comment: 17 page