Fusions of the generalized Hamming scheme on a strongly-regular graph (Q2674384)

This paper is motivated by a desire to understand the fusions of classical association schemes and their product schemes and addresses the special case of the tensor product of a rank 3 scheme \({\mathcal A}\) with itself. The authors find all possible fusions of \( {\mathcal A}\otimes {\mathcal A}\) that exist for all \({\mathcal A}\), that is the fusion exists regardless of the eigenvalues of \({\mathcal A}\). The generalized Hamming scheme is one of these fusions. In the cases where the existence of a fusion depends on the parameters of \({\mathcal A}\), they give the required parameters of \({\mathcal A}\) and find examples of strongly-regular graphs admitting these parameters. Note that the same techniques can be used to determine the parameters of symmetric rank 3 table algebras or character algebras whose symmetric tensor algebra have extra fusions. It is shown that non-trivial fusions, other than the homogeneous fusion of \(H(2,{\mathcal A})\), only exist in seven exceptional cases, and in each case, the strongly-regular graphs with the required parameters were identified. The main result of this paper provides a complete classification of fusions of the symmetric square of \({\mathcal A}\). This result is not new, as it was also obtained by \textit{I. A. Faradzhev} [in: Investigations in the algebraic theory of combinatorial objects, Proc. Semin., Moskva 76--95 (1985; Zbl 0707.20006)]. Although these results are not new, the context and proof technique is completely different from the one used by Faradžev [loc. cit.]. Specifically, the authors' approach is based on character tables of association schemes.