Relative t-designs in binary Hamming association scheme H(n,2)

Abstract

A relative t-design in the binary Hamming association schemes H(n,2) is equivalent to a weighted regular t-wise balanced design, i.e., certain combinatorial t-design which allow different sizes of blocks and a weight function on blocks. In this paper, we study relative t-designs in H(n,2), putting emphasis on Fisher type inequalities and the existence of tight relative t-designs. We mostly consider relative t-designs on two shells. We prove that if the weight function is constant on each shell of a relative t-design on two shells then the subset in each shell must be a combinatorial (t-1)-design. This is a generalization of the result of Kageyama who proved this under the stronger assumption that the weight function is constant on the whole block set. Using this, we define tight relative t-designs for odd t, and a strong restriction on the possible parameters of tight relative t-designs in H(n,2). We obtained a new family of such tight relative t-designs, which were unnoticed before. We will give a list of feasible parameters of such relative 3-designs with n up to 100, and then we discuss the existence and/or the non-existence of such tight relative 3-designs. We also discuss feasible parameters of tight relative 4-designs on two shells in H(n,2) with n up 50. In this study we come up with the connection on the topics of classical design theory, such as symmetric 2-designs (in particular 2-(4u-1,2u-1,u-1) Hadamard designs) and Driessen's result on the non-existence of certain 3-designs. We believe the Problem 1 and Problem 2 presented in Section 5.2 open a new way to study relative t-designs in H(n,2). We conclude our paper listing several open problems.