On a new family of flag-transitive semibiplanes (Q5942875)

A semibiplane and a \(c.c^*\)-geometry are equivalent things. The first is obtained from the second by restricting to the types corresponding with the end nodes of the diagram, while the second arises from the first by defining the pairs of points as the elements of a new type of elements (with obvious incidence relation). In the paper under review, the authors have a look at the affine expansion of the \(d\)-dimensional dual hyperovals constructed by \textit{S. Yoshiara} [Eur. J. Comb. 20, No. 6, 489-503 (1999; Zbl 0937.51009)], i.e., the semibiplane defined from such a hyperoval \({\mathcal S}\) as follows: embed the projective space in which \({\mathcal S}\) lives into a projective space of one dimension higher and distinguish between affine points and points at infinity. The points of the semibiplane are the affine points, the blocks are the affine subspaces meeting infinity in an element of the dual hyperoval \({\mathcal S}\) (which are subspaces of PG\((n,2)\) for some \(n)\). The authors do a tough investigation of these examples, aiming to show that many of them are new. In fact, they almost succeed, as they find isomorphisms of the semibiplanes belonging to some subclasses of the new ones to some known semibiplanes, and they prove that the others cannot be isomorphic to any previously known one, except possibly to certain covers or quotients of semibiplanes arising from buildings of type \(D_n\) over the field of two elements (although they rule these out if the parameters satisfy some mild divisibility condition). The proofs use a lot of computations, but the authors explain them well. Moreover, elegant arguments involving the so-called wrapping numbers are also present. The isomorphisms are given in an algebraic way; I wonder whether there is no purely geometric proof of the fact that certain semibiplanes of the new family are isomorphic to some relation semibiplanes of Hughes.