A generalization of the Haemers-Mathon bound for near hexagons (Q2026345)

A partial linear space \(\mathcal{S} = (\mathcal{P},\mathcal{L},I)\) is a point-line geometry with nonempty point set \(\mathcal{P}\), line set \(\mathcal{L}\), and incidence relation \(I \subset \mathcal{P}\times \mathcal{L}\) such that any two distinct points are incident with at most one line. The order of \(\mathcal{S}\) is \((s, t)\) if every line is incident with precisely \(s + 1\) points and every point is incident with exactly \(t + 1\) lines. A partial linear space \(\mathcal{S}\) is called a near hexagon if its collinearity graph has diameter \(3\) and if for every point \(x\) and every line \(L\), there exists a unique point on \(L\) that is nearest to \(x\) with respect to the distance in the collinearity graph. Also, it is said to be regular with parameters \((s, t, t_2)\), where \(s,t, t_2 \in \mathbb{N}\) if \(\mathcal{S}\) has order \((s, t)\) and if every two points at distance \(2\) have precisely \(t_2 + 1\) common neighbors. If \(\mathcal{S}\) is a finite regular near hexagon with parameters \((s, t , t_2)\), \(s \geq 2\), the Haemers-Mathon bound states that \(t \leq s^3 + t_2(s^2 - s + 1)\). The main result of this paper is a generalization of the previous result to arbitrary finite near hexagons with an order, having the Haemers-Mathon bound as special case. The proof involves the orders of the quads through a given line and it is based on the investigation of the ranks of matrices associated with generalized quadrangles of order \((s,t_2)\).