1-polarized pseudo-hexagons (Q1022882)

This work is a continuation of the authors' investigations begun in their paper [Des. Codes Cryptogr. 47, 249--266 (2008)] aiming at characterizing the embedding of the split Cayley hexagons \(H(q)\), \(q\) even, in \(PG(5,q)\) by intersection numbers with respect to their lines. They prove that, for \(q\neq 3\), every pseudo-hexagon (i.e. a set \(\mathcal{L}\) of lines of \(PG(5,q)\) with the properties that (1) every plane contains 0, 1 or \(q+1\) elements of \(\mathcal{L}\), (2) every solid contains no more than \(q^2+q+1\) and no less than \(q+1\) elements of \(\mathcal{L}\), and (3) every point of \(PG(5,q)\) is on \(q+1\) members of \(\mathcal{L}\)) which is 1-polarized at some point \(x\) (i.e., the lines of \(\mathcal{L}\) through \(x\) do not span \(PG(5,q)\)) is either the line set of the standard embedding of \(H(q)\) in \(PG(5,q)\), or \(q=2\) (in the latter case all pseudo-hexagons are classified in the above mentioned paper).