Pairwise balanced designs with prescribed minimum dimension

Abstract

The dimension of a linear space is the maximum positive integer $d$ such that any $d$ of its points generate a proper subspace. For a set $K$ of integers at least two, recall that a pairwise balanced design PBD$(v,K)$ is a linear space on $v$ points whose lines (or blocks) have sizes belonging to $K$. We show that, for any prescribed set of sizes $K$ and lower bound $d$ on the dimension, there exists a PBD$(v,K)$ of dimension at least $d$ for all sufficiently large and numerically admissible $v$.