On set systems with restricted intersections modulo \(p\) and \(p\)-ary \(t\)-designs (Q1011503)

Modified summary: The author considers bounds on the size of families \(\mathcal F\) of subsets of a \(v\)-set subject to restrictions modulo a prime \(p\) on the cardinalities of the pairwise intersections. He improves the known bound when \(\mathcal F\) is allowed to contain sets of different sizes, but only in a special case. He shows that if the bound for uniform families \(\mathcal F\) holds with equality, then \(\mathcal F\) is the set of blocks of what we call a \(p\)-ary \(t\)-design for certain values of \(t\). Given a multiset \(\mathcal A\) of subsets of a set \(\mathcal X\), let \(\lambda(T)\) denote the number of members of \(\mathcal A\) that contain \(T\), counting each subset \(A\in {\mathcal A}\) according to is multiplicity. Let \(p\) be a prime. A \(p\)-ary \(t\)-\((v,k,\lambda)\) design is a \(v\)-set \(\mathcal X\) and a multiset \(\mathcal A\) of \(k\)-subsets (called blocks) of \(\mathcal X\) so that \(\lambda(T)\equiv \lambda \pmod{p}\) for every \(t\)-subset \(T\) of \(\mathcal X\). The last two sections of this paper contain some observations about \(p\)-ary \(t\)-designs and some Fisher-like inequalities for these designs.