On a rank four geometry for the Hall--Janko sporadic group (Q1865418)

The author continues his work on the construction of diagram geometries on which sporadic groups act flag-transitively. He has done so previously for Mathieu groups, and in the paper under review he deals with the Hall-Janko group \(J_2\). \textit{F. Buekenhout} and \textit{C. Huybrechts} [Geom. Dedicata 73, 225-235 (1998; Zbl 0923.51008)] obtained a rank three geometry on which \(J_2\) acts residually weakly primitively but no such rank four geometries were known. The author now constructs a firm residually connected rank four geometry \(\Gamma\) with 75600 chambers on which \(J_2\) acts flag-transitively, locally 2-transitively and residually weakly primitively. Furthermore, it is shown that the full automorphism group of \(\Gamma\) is isomorphic to \(J_2\) and the group of correlations of \(\Gamma\) is isomorphic to Aut\((J_2)\times 2\). The construction of \(\Gamma\) is based on the well-known rank 3 graph \({\mathcal G}\) of degree 63 associated with \(J_2\), which arises from the permutation representation \(G\) of \(J_2\) of degree 100. If \(\Omega\) is the vertex set of \({\mathcal G}\), one takes two copies \(\Omega_1\) and \(\Omega_2\) of \(\Omega\) to obtain the elements of type 1 and 2 in \(\Gamma\), respectively. For the other elements the author considers circles in \({\mathcal G}\), that is, certain 4-cliques of \({\mathcal G}\) that form an orbit under \(G\). Each circle \(c\) determines two others circles \(c'\) and \(c''\) such that \(c\), \(c'\) and \(c''\) are pairwise at maximal distance. There are two classes of ordered triples of circles as above which are not conjugate under the action of \(G\). The triples in these two classes form the elements of types 3 and 4. Incidence between elements of different types is defined case by case. E.g. an element of type 1 or 2 is incident with an element of type 3 or 4 if the corresponding point in \(\Omega\) belongs to a specific circle in the corresponding ordered triples of circles.