A new bound on the number of designs with classical affine parameters (Q697633)

A {2-\((v,k,\lambda)\)} design, also often denoted by \(S_{\lambda}(2,k,v)\), is a pair \((V,\mathcal{B})\), where \(V\) is a \(v\)-set, whose elements are called points, and \(\mathcal{B}\) is a collection of \(k\)-subsets of \(V\), called blocks, such that any 2-subset of \(V\) is contained in exactly \(\lambda\) blocks. A parallel class is a partition of \(V\) into blocks and a resolution is a partition of \(\mathcal{B}\) into parallel classes. A design is called resolvable if it has at least one resolution. The parameters of a resolvable {2-\((v,k,\lambda)\)} design satisfy \(b \geq v + r - 1\), where \(b\) is the number of blocks and \(r = \lambda(v-1)/(k-1)\) is the number of blocks through a given point. A resolvable design with \(b = v + r - 1\) is called affine. An affine resolvable design has a unique resolution and any two blocks in different parallel classes intersect in exactly \(\mu = k^2/v\) points. The hyperplanes of an affine geometry of dimension \(d\) and order \(q\) form an affine resolvable {2-\((q^d,q^{d-1},\frac{q^{d-1}-1}{q-1})\)} design. \textit{D. Jungnickel} [Geom. Dedicata 16, 167-178 (1984; Zbl 0546.05008)] proved an exponential lower bound on the number of non-isomorphic affine resolvable designs with these parameters, for \(d \geq 3\). This bound was recently improved by \textit{C. Lam, S. Lam} and \textit{V. D. Tonchev} [J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 92, 186-196 (2000; Zbl 0971.05019)]. In the present paper, the authors further improve the bound. They prove that, for any \(d \geq 3\), there are at least \(\frac{(q^{d-1}+q^{d-2}+\cdots+1)!(q-1)} {|P \Gamma L(d,q)||A \Gamma L(d,q)|}\) non-isomorphic designs of this type. As a consequence, there are at least 245,100,000 non-isomorphic {2-(27,9,4)} designs (the previously best known lower bound for these parameters, due to Spence, was 8071).