Imprimitive flag-transitive symmetric designs

AbstractA recent paper of O'Reilly Regueiro obtained an explicit upper bound on the number of points of a flag-transitive, point-imprimitive, symmetric design in terms of the number of blocks containing two points. We improve that upper bound and give a complete list of feasible parameter sequences for such designs for which two points lie in at most ten blocks. Classifications are available for some of these parameter sequences

Alternating groups as flag-transitive automorphism groups of 2-designs with block size seven

In this article, we study flag-transitive $2$-$(v,k,\lambda)$ designs with small block size. We show that if $k$ is prime, then $G$ is point-primitive. In particular, we show that if $k=7$, then $G$ is of almost simple or affine type. We also prove that if $\mathcal{D}$ is a $2$-design with $k=7$ admitting flag-transitive almost simple automorphism group with socle an alternating group, then $\mathcal{D}$ is $PG_{2}(3,2)$ with parameter set $(15,7,3)$ and $G=A_7$, or $\mathcal{D}$ is the $2$-design with parameter set $(55, 7, 1680)$ and $G=A_{11}$ or $S_{11}$

A Census Of Highly Symmetric Combinatorial Designs

As a consequence of the classification of the finite simple groups, it has been possible in recent years to characterize Steiner t-designs, that is t-(v,k,1) designs, mainly for t = 2, admitting groups of automorphisms with sufficiently strong symmetry properties. However, despite the finite simple group classification, for Steiner t-designs with t > 2 most of these characterizations have remained longstanding challenging problems. Especially, the determination of all flag-transitive Steiner t-designs with 2 < t < 7 is of particular interest and has been open for about 40 years (cf. [11, p. 147] and [12, p. 273], but presumably dating back to 1965). The present paper continues the author's work [20, 21, 22] of classifying all flag-transitive Steiner 3-designs and 4-designs. We give a complete classification of all flag-transitive Steiner 5-designs and prove furthermore that there are no non-trivial flag-transitive Steiner 6-designs. Both results rely on the classification of the finite 3-homogeneous permutation groups. Moreover, we survey some of the most general results on highly symmetric Steiner t-designs.Comment: 26 pages; to appear in: "Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics