The structure of triangle-free quasi-symmetric designs (Q1094427)

The authors study quasi-symmetric 2-designs with intersection numbers \(x=0\) and y which do not contain three mutually disjoint blocks (such structures are called triangle-free quasi-symmetric designs). This continues previous work of \textit{A. Baartmans} and \textit{M. S. Shrikhande} [``Designs with no three mutually disjoint blocks'', Discrete Math. 40, 129-139 (1982; Zbl 0488.05009)]. In particular, they show that all the parameters of such a design can be expressed in terms of the two parameters y and \(m=k/y\) (k the block size). They give alternative proofs for results of Baartmans and Shrikhande: One has \(2\leq m\leq y+1\), and the extremal cases can be characterized. The authors conjecture that there are only finitely many exceptional triangle-free quasisymmetric designs (i.e., examples where \(3\leq m\leq y)\); this conjecture is proved if k is a prime power (then there are no exceptional examples at all).