Regular partitions of half-spin geometries (Q331166)

Given \(n \in \mathbb{N} \setminus \{0,1\}\) and a prime power \(q\), the point set of the half-spin geometry is one family of generators of dimension \(n+1\) of a hyperbolic quadric in \(\mathrm{PG}(2n-1,q)\). The lines are subspaces of dimension \(n-3\) on the quadric, and incidence is the containment relation. The authors study regular partitions of half-spin geometries. These are partitions \(\{X_1,X_2,\ldots,X_k\}\) of the point set such that for any two \(X_i\), \(X_j\) every point \(x \in X_i\) is collinear with precisely \(a_{ij}\) points of \(X_j \setminus \{x\}\). They describe several families of regular partitions and compute the eigenvalues of the matrix \((a_{ij})\) which are assumed to capture some combinatorial information. The eigenvalues in the authors' examples can be computed by a general result on the eigenvalues of matrix polynomials with integer coefficients and their values at prime powers.