Construction of BIB designs with various support sizes - with special emphasis for \(v=8\) and \(k=4\) (Q790118)

The authors are interested in constructing new BIB designs (with or without repeated blocks) from known designs by trading off [see \textit{A. Hedayat} and \textit{S. R. Li}, Ann. Discrete Math. 6, 189-200 (1980; Zbl 0455.05016)] and by combining [see \textit{J. H. van Lint}, J. Comb. Theory, Ser. A 15, 288-309 (1973; Zbl 0285.05014)]. If the standard notation \(D=BIB(v,b,r,k,\lambda)\) is complemented as \(D=BIB(v,b,r,k,\lambda | b^*), b^*\) denotes the number of distinct blocks of D and it is called the support size of D. The authors are particularly interested in the case where \(v=8\) and \(k=4\). They prove that if \(D=BIB(8,14t,7t,4,3t)\) contains a block repeated more than t times, then \(b^*\geq 17\). This implies that \(b^*\geq 14\) for any BIB design with \(v=8\) and \(k=4\). They constructed 53 minimal BIB designs with \(v=8\) and \(k=4\), where a minimal design means a design with the minimal b for given \(b^*\) (\(14\leq b^*\leq 70; b^*\neq 15,16,17,19)\).