On Mathon's construction of maximal arcs in Desarguesian planes. II

In a recent paper [M], Mathon gives a new construction of maximal arcs which generalizes the construction of Denniston. In relation to this construction, Mathon asks the question of determining the largest degree of a non-Denniston maximal arc arising from his new construction. In this paper, we give a nearly complete answer to this problem. Specifically, we prove that when $m\geq 5$ and $m\neq 9$, the largest $d$ of a non-Denniston maximal arc of degree $2^d$ in PG(2,2^m) generated by a {p,1}-map is (\floor {m/2} +1). This confirms our conjecture in [FLX]. For {p,q}-maps, we prove that if $m\geq 7$ and $m\neq 9$, then the largest $d$ of a non-Denniston maximal arc of degree $2^d$ in PG(2,2^m) generated by a {p,q}-map is either \floor {m/2} +1 or \floor{m/2} +2.Comment: 21 page

Bent functions, SDP designs and their automorphism groups

PhD ThesisIn a 1976 paper Rothaus coined the term “bent” to describe a function f from a vector space V (n, 2) to F2 with the property that the Fourier coefficients of (−1)f have unit magnitude. Such a function has the maximum possible distance from the set of linear functions, hence the name, and has useful correlation properties. These lead to various applications to coding theory and cryptography, some of which are described. A standard notion of the equivalence of two bent functions is discussed and related to the coding theory setting. Two constructions mentioned by Rothaus and generalised by Maiorana are described. A further generalisation of one of these, involving sets of bent functions on direct summands of the original vector space, is described and proved. Various methods including computer searches are used to find appropriate sets of bent functions and hence many new equivalence classes of bent functions of 8 variables. Equivalence class invariants are used to show that most of these classes cannot be constructed by the earlier methods. Some bounds on numbers of bent functions are discussed. A 2-design is said to have the symmetric difference property (SDP) if the symmetric difference of any three blocks is either a block or the complement of a block — such a design is very close to being a 3-design. All SDP designs are induced by bent functions, and conversely. Work on the automorphism groups of various SDP designs involving computer algebra is described. An SDP design on 256 points with trivial automorphism group is noted. Some connections with strongly-regular graphs are discussed. An infinite class of pseudo-geometric strongly-regular graphs induced by bent functions is noted, and bent functions which are their own Fourier transform duals are investigated. Finally, some open problems and ideas for future work are described