Abstract
In this paper, results of a non-exhaustive computer search for unitals in the known planes of order twenty-five are reported. The 2-(126, 6, 1) designs associated with newly found unitals are studied in detail. 938 non-isomorphic unital designs are discovered and we show that three of the unital designs are embeddable in two non-isomorphic planes and 239 of them are resolvable. The findings of this study improve some well-known lower bounds on the number of such designs and provide new connections between some pairs of planes. A conjecture concerning the p-ranks of unital designs embedded in planes of order \(q^2\) is formulated.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Andriamanalimanana B.R.: Ovals, unitals and codes. Ph.D. thesis, Lehigh University (1979)
Bagchi, S., Bagchi, B.: Designs from pairs of finite fields. A cyclic unital U(6) and other regular Steiner 2-designs. J. Comb. Theory Ser. A 52(1), 51–61 (1989)
Baker, R.D., Elbert, G.L.: On Buekenhout-Metz unitals of odd order. J. Combin. Theory Ser. A 60(1), 67–84 (1992)
Bamberg, J., Betten, A., Praeger, C.E., Wassermann, A.: Unitals in the Desarguesian projective plane of order 16. J. Stat. Plan. Inference 144, 110–122 (2014)
Barwick, S.G.: A characterization of the classical unital. Geometriae Dedicata 52, 175–180 (1994)
Barwick, S., Ebert, G.: Unitals in Projective Planes. Springer, Berlin (2008)
Beth, T., Jungnickel, D., Lenz, H.: Design Theory, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1999)
Betten, A., Betten, D., Tonchev, V.D.: Unitals and codes. Discrete Math. 267(1–3), 23–33 (2003)
Brouwer, A.E.: Some unitals on 28 points and their embeddings in projective planes of order 9. Geometries and Groups, Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics 893, 183–188 (1981)
Buekenhout, F.: Existence of unitals in finite translation planes of order \(q^2\) with a kernel of \(q\). Geometriae Dedicata 5, 189–194 (1976)
Colbourn, C.J., Dinitz, J.F. (eds.): Handbook of Combinatorial Designs, 2nd edn. Chapman & Hall/CRC, Boca Raton (2007)
Czerwinski, T., Oakden, D.: The translation planes of order twenty-five. J. Comb. Theory Ser. A 59(2), 193–217 (1992)
Dembowski, P.: Finite Geometries, vol. 44. Springer, Berlin (1968)
Ebert, G.L.: On Buekenhout-Metz unitals of even order. Eur. J. Comb. 13, 109–117 (1992)
Grüning, K.: A class of unitals of order q which can be embedded in two different planes of order \(q^2\). J. Geometry 29, 61–77 (1987)
Hirschfeld, J.W.P.: Projective Geometries over Finite Fields, 2nd edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1998)
Jaffe, D., Tonchev, V.D.: Computing linear codes and unitals. Designs Codes Cryptogr. 14, 39–52 (1998)
Kestenband, B.: A family of unitals in the hughes plane. Can. J. Math. 42(6), 1067–1083 (1990)
Krčadinac, V., Nakic, A., Pavčevic, M.O.: The Kramer Mesner method with tactical decompositions: some new unitals on 65 points. J. Comb. Des. 9(4), 290–303 (2011)
Krčadinac, V., Smoljak, K.: Pedal sets of unitals in projective planes of order 9 and 16. Sarajevo J. Math. 7(20), 255–264 (2011)
Metz, R.: On a class of unitals. Geometriae Dedicata 8, 125–126 (1979)
Moorhouse, G.E.: On projective planes of order less than 32. Finite Geometries, Groups, and Computation, pp. 149–162 (2006)
Penttila, T., Royle, G.F.: Sets of type (m, n) in the affine and projective planes of order 9. Designs Codes Cryptogr. 6, 229–245 (1995)
Rosati, L.A.: Disegni unitari nei piani di Hughes. Geometriae Dedicata 27, 295–299 (1988)
Stoichev, S.D.: Algorithms for finding unitals and maximal arcs in projective planes of order 16. Serdica J. Comput. 1(3), 279–292 (2007)
Stoichev, S.D.: New exact and heuristic algorithms for graph automorphism group and graph isomorphism. ACM J. Exp. Algorithmics 24(1), 1–27 (2019)
Stoichev, S.D.: Experimental Results of the Search for Unitals in Projective Planes of Order 25. ar**v:1211.0596
Stoichev, S.D., Gezek, M.: Unitals in projective planes of order 16. Turkish J. Math. 45(2), 1001–1014 (2021)
Stoichev, S.D., Tonchev, V.D.: Unital designs in planes of order 16. Discrete Appl. Math. 102(1–2), 151–158 (2000)
Tonchev, V.D.: Combinatorial Configurations. Wiley, New York (1988)
Tonchev, V.D., Wassermann, A.: On the classification of unitals on 28 points of low rank. Appl. Algebra Eng. Commun. Comput. 33, 903–913 (2022)
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Vladimir Tonchev for suggesting the problem of develo** an algorithm for finding unitals in projective planes and for giving the general idea of such algorithm (use of unions of combinations of orbits of different subgroups of the plane’s automorphism group), and for the extensive discussions and exchanges for many years. The authors would like to thank also the anonymous referee for reading carefully the manuscript and making several useful remarks.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
A Some Statistics Related to Unital Designs Embedded in Projective Planes of Order 25
A Some Statistics Related to Unital Designs Embedded in Projective Planes of Order 25
See Table 3.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Stoichev, S.D., Gezek, M. Unitals in Projective Planes of Order 25. Math.Comput.Sci. 17, 5 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11786-023-00556-9
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11786-023-00556-9