Using permutation rational functions to obtain permutation arrays with large Hamming distance (Q2153758)

Let \(\pi\) and \(\sigma\) be permutations over \(n\) symbols. The Hamming distance between \(\pi\) and \(\sigma\), denoted by \(\operatorname{hd}(\pi, \sigma)\), is the number of positions \(x\) such that \(\pi(x) \neq \sigma(x)\). Then the Hamming distance of a permutation array (PA) \(A\) is defined by \(\operatorname{hd}(A) = \min \{ \operatorname{hd}(\pi, \sigma) \mid \pi, \sigma \in A, \pi \neq \sigma \}\). Let \(M(n, D)\) denote the maximum number of permutations in any PA \(A\) on \(n\) symbols with Hamming distance \(D\). Let \(q\) be a prime power. Previously, lower bounds for \(M(q, D)\) for some \(q\) and \(D\) were obtained using PAs constructed by permutation polynomials of bounded degree. Recently, permutation rational functions (PRF) are also used to compute some improved lower bound for \(M(q, D)\) and \(M(q+1, D)\). This paper extends previous work on PAs with large Hamming distance and PRFs and gives improved lower bounds for \(M(q, D)\) and \(M(q+1, D)\). More explicitly, they use PRFs of specified degree \(d\) to obtain an improved lower bound for \(M(q, q-k)\) such that \(k\in \{5, 6, 7, 8, 9\}\), and for \(M(q+1, q-k)\) such that \(k\in \{4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9\}\).