151 research outputs found
Regular Incidence Complexes, Polytopes, and C-Groups
Regular incidence complexes are combinatorial incidence structures
generalizing regular convex polytopes, regular complex polytopes, various types
of incidence geometries, and many other highly symmetric objects. The special
case of abstract regular polytopes has been well-studied. The paper describes
the combinatorial structure of a regular incidence complex in terms of a system
of distinguished generating subgroups of its automorphism group or a
flag-transitive subgroup. Then the groups admitting a flag-transitive action on
an incidence complex are characterized as generalized string C-groups. Further,
extensions of regular incidence complexes are studied, and certain incidence
complexes particularly close to abstract polytopes, called abstract polytope
complexes, are investigated.Comment: 24 pages; to appear in "Discrete Geometry and Symmetry", M. Conder,
A. Deza, and A. Ivic Weiss (eds), Springe
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
The Veldkamp space of multiple qubits
We introduce a point-line incidence geometry in which the commutation
relations of the real Pauli group of multiple qubits are fully encoded. Its
points are pairs of Pauli operators differing in sign and each line contains
three pairwise commuting operators any of which is the product of the other two
(up to sign).
We study the properties of its Veldkamp space enabling us to identify subsets
of operators which are distinguished from the geometric point of view. These
are geometric hyperplanes and pairwise intersections thereof.
Among the geometric hyperplanes one can find the set of self-dual operators
with respect to the Wootters spin-flip operation well-known from studies
concerning multiqubit entanglement measures. In the two- and three-qubit cases
a class of hyperplanes gives rise to Mermin squares and other generalized
quadrangles. In the three-qubit case the hyperplane with points corresponding
to the 27 Wootters self-dual operators is just the underlying geometry of the
E6(6) symmetric entropy formula describing black holes and strings in five
dimensions.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure; added references, corrected typos; minor change
Generalised quadrangles with a group of automorphisms acting primitively on points and lines
We show that if G is a group of automorphisms of a thick finite generalised
quadrangle Q acting primitively on both the points and lines of Q, then G is
almost simple. Moreover, if G is also flag-transitive then G is of Lie type.Comment: 20 page
An outline of polar spaces: basics and advances
This paper is an extended version of a series of lectures on polar spaces
given during the workshop and conference 'Groups and Geometries', held at the
Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore in December 2012. The aim of this
paper is to give an overview of the theory of polar spaces focusing on some
research topics related to polar spaces. We survey the fundamental results
about polar spaces starting from classical polar spaces. Then we introduce and
report on the state of the art on the following research topics: polar spaces
of infinite rank, embedding polar spaces in groups and projective embeddings of
dual polar spaces
Steiner t-designs for large t
One of the most central and long-standing open questions in combinatorial
design theory concerns the existence of Steiner t-designs for large values of
t. Although in his classical 1987 paper, L. Teirlinck has shown that
non-trivial t-designs exist for all values of t, no non-trivial Steiner
t-design with t > 5 has been constructed until now. Understandingly, the case t
= 6 has received considerable attention. There has been recent progress
concerning the existence of highly symmetric Steiner 6-designs: It is shown in
[M. Huber, J. Algebr. Comb. 26 (2007), pp. 453-476] that no non-trivial
flag-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist. In this paper, we announce that
essentially also no block-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist.Comment: 9 pages; to appear in: Mathematical Methods in Computer Science 2008,
ed. by J.Calmet, W.Geiselmann, J.Mueller-Quade, Springer Lecture Notes in
Computer Scienc
On hyperovals of polar spaces
We derive lower and upper bounds for the size of a hyperoval of a finite polar space of rank 3. We give a computer-free proof for the uniqueness, up to isomorphism, of the hyperoval of size 126 of H(5, 4) and prove that the near hexagon E-3 has up to isomorphism a unique full embedding into the dual polar space DH(5, 4)
Quotients of incidence geometries
We develop a theory for quotients of geometries and obtain sufficient
conditions for the quotient of a geometry to be a geometry. These conditions
are compared with earlier work on quotients, in particular by Pasini and Tits.
We also explore geometric properties such as connectivity, firmness and
transitivity conditions to determine when they are preserved under the
quotienting operation. We show that the class of coset pregeometries, which
contains all flag-transitive geometries, is closed under an appropriate
quotienting operation.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure
Highly symmetric hypertopes
We study incidence geometries that are thin and residually
connected. These geometries generalise abstract polytopes. In this generalised setting, guided by the ideas from the polytopes theory, we introduce the concept of chirality, a property of orderly asymmetry occurring frequently in nature as a natural phenomenon. The main result in this paper is that automorphism groups of regular and chiral thin residually connected geometries need to be C-groups in the regular case
and C+-groups in the chiral case
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