More on spherical designs of harmonic index $t$

Abstract

A finite subset $Y$ on the unit sphere $S^{n-1} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ is called a spherical design of harmonic index $t$, if the following condition is satisfied: $\sum_{\mathbf{x}\in Y}f(\mathbf{x})=0$ for all real homogeneous harmonic polynomials $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ of degree $t$. Also, for a subset $T$ of $\mathbb{N} = \{1,2,\cdots \}$, a finite subset $Y\subset S^{n-1}$ is called a spherical design of harmonic index $T,$ if $\sum_{\mathbf{x}\in Y}f(\mathbf{x})=0$ is satisfied for all real homogeneous harmonic polynomials $f(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$ of degree $k$ with $k\in T$. In the present paper we first study Fisher type lower bounds for the sizes of spherical designs of harmonic index $t$ (or for harmonic index $T$). We also study 'tight' spherical designs of harmonic index $t$ or index $T$. Here 'tight' means that the size of $Y$ attains the lower bound for this Fisher type inequality. The classification problem of tight spherical designs of harmonic index $t$ was started by Bannai-Okuda-Tagami (2015), and the case $t = 4$ was completed by Okuda-Yu (2015+). In this paper we show the classification (non-existence) of tight spherical designs of harmonic index 6 and 8, as well as the asymptotic non-existence of tight spherical designs of harmonic index $2e$ for general $e\geq 3$. We also study the existence problem for tight spherical designs of harmonic index $T$ for some $T$, in particular, including index $T = \{8,4\}$. We use (i) the linear programming method by Delsarte, (ii) the detailed information on the locations of the zeros as well as the local minimum values of Gegenbauer polynomials, (iii) the generalization by Hiroshi Nozaki of the Larman-Rogers-Seidel theorem on $2$-distance sets to $s$-distance sets, (iv) the theory of elliptic diophantine equations, and (v) the semidefinite programming method of eliminating some $2$-angular line systems for small dimensions.