Non \(t\)-intersecting families of linear spaces over \(GF(q)\) (Q1176745)

Let \(n,s,t\) be nonnegative integers with \(s\leq t<n\) and let \(V\) be an \(n\)-dimensional vector space over some finite field \(GF(q)\). Let \(\mathcal F\) be a family of linear subspaces of \(V\) with the property that the dimension of the intersection \(F_ 1\cap F_ 2\) of each two elements \(F_ 1,F_ 2\) of \(\mathcal F\) is either smaller than \(s\) or larger than \(t\). By a linear algebraic method it is shown that for \(n\geq 9t\) the cardinality of \(\mathcal F\) satisfies \[ | \mathcal F|\leq\begin{cases} \sum\limits _ {i=0} ^ {s-1}{n\choose i}_ q + \sum\limits _ {i=(n + t + 1)/2} ^ {n}{n\choose i}_ q&\text{if }n + t\text{ is odd}\\ \sum\limits _ {i=0} ^ {s-1}{n\choose i}_ q + {n-1\choose (n+t)/2}_ q \sum\limits _ {i=(n + t + 2)/2} ^ {n}{n\choose i}_ q&\text{if }n + t\text{ is even}\end{cases} \] where \({n\choose i}_ q\) denotes the usual \(q\)-binomial coefficient. Moreover, all extremal families \(\mathcal F\) are characterized. This result is an exact \(q\)-analogue of a result of \textit{P. Frankl} and \textit{Z. Fűredi} [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 36, 230-236 (1984; Zbl 0529.05045)] who proved a corresponding result for finite sets.