Recursive constructions for 3-designs and resolvable 3-designs (Q5954612)

This paper deals with the problem of constructing 3-designs and resolvable 3-designs by using recursive methods, and the designs considered here are simple in the sense that they do not contain any repeated block. The constructions here rely on the doubling construction for Steiner quadruple systems and a generalization of the doubling construction. A \(t\)-\((v,k,\lambda)\) design \(D\) is a collection of \(k\)-subsets of a set \(S\) with \(v\) elements such that any \(t\)-subset of \(S\) appears in exactly \(\lambda\) blocks. Clearly BIBDs are such designs with \(t=2\). A resolvable \(t\)-\((v,k,\lambda)\) design \(D\) here is one such that the blocks of \(D\) can be partitioned into parallel classes, each class consisting of \(v/k\) pairwise disjoint blocks. In Section 2, the author presents many new families of 3-designs as well as of resolvable 3-designs by using a general form of the doubling construction for 3-designs. In the next two sections construction methods are presented which provide 3-designs whose number of points is not necessarily divisible by the block size. Section 5 deals with the constructions for 3-designs with block sizes \(k=5, 7\), and \(8\), and there is an appendix containing a list of parameters for the newly constructed 3-designs.