A characterization of t-designs in terms of the inner distribution (Q1124591)

The term design is to mean a 0-design; that is an incidence structure \({\mathcal D}=({\mathcal P},{\mathcal B},I)\), where \({\mathcal P}\) is a set of v points, \({\mathcal B}\) is a set of b blocks, \(I\subseteq {\mathcal P}\times {\mathcal B}\) is a relation called incidence and each \(B\in {\mathcal B}\) is incident with k points. In a design with no repeated blocks \((C_ k,C_{k-1},...,C_ 0)\) is the inner distribution of Delsarte. In this paper, an inequality for 0-design has been derived, which holds with equality iff the design is a t-design. This inequality is then applied to the case of regular designs; that is the designs in which the number of blocks intersecting a given block in a given number of points is a constant depending only on the number of points. Further, this analysis has been used to characterize the Steiner system \({\mathcal S}(4,7,23)\) in terms of the derived design at two points.