Switching for 2-designs (Q2153750)

A trade for a 2-\((v, k, \lambda\)) design consists of two disjoint sets of blocks with the property that if the design contains the blocks of one of the sets, then these blocks can be replaced by the blocks of the other set. In this paper, a switching for 2-designs, which defines a type of trade was introduced. This method is illustrated by applying it to some symmetric (64, 28, 12) designs, showing that the switching introduced in this paper in some cases can be applied directly to orbit matrices. In that way, six new symmetric (64, 28, 12) designs are obtained. Further, the authors show that this type of switching (of trades) can be applied to any symmetric design related to a Bush-type Hadamard matrix and construct symmetric designs with parameters (36, 15, 6) leading to new Bush-type Hadamard matrices of order 36, and symmetric (100, 45, 20) designs yielding Bush-type Hadamard matrices of order 100. The last section contains concluding remarks. For the computations, the authors use the computer algebra system MAGMA.