On regular systems of finite classical polar spaces (Q2065122)

This article is a general study of \emph{regular systems} of finite polar spaces: sets of generators that uniformly cover the singular subspaces of a fixed dimension (\(k-1\) say). In other words, if we take the \((k-1)\)-dimensional singular spaces to be the `points' and the regular system to be the `blocks', then we obtain a regular uniform hypergraph. The replication number (number of generators of the regular system on a given singular \((k-1)\)-space) is \(m\) in the paper. The main results are that many of the low-dimensional classical polar spaces do not have regular \(1\)-systems with respect to lines, or planes (Theorem 2.5). Specifically, the finite polar spaces of the following types don't have regular \(1\)-systems with respect to lines: \(Q^+_7\), \(H_7\), \(W_7\), \(Q_8\), \(H_8\), \(Q^-_9\). The following types don't have regular \(1\)-systems with respect to planes: \(Q^+_9\), \(H_9\), \(W_9\), \(Q_{10}\), \(H_{10}\), \(Q^-_{11}\). In Section 3 of their paper, the authors give results on propagation of regular \(m\)-systems and construct infinite families of examples of regular systems (cf. Corollary 3.7--3.10). The remainder of the paper is about constructions of hemisystems of elliptic quadrics (Section 4), regular systems obtained from Shult and Thas's \(k\)-systems of polar spaces (Section 5), and examples obtained via field reduction (Section 6).