Combinatorial t-designs from quadratic functions

Abstract

Combinatorial $t$-designs have been an interesting topic in combinatorics for decades. It was recently reported that the image sets of a fixed size of certain special polynomials may constitute a $t$-design. Till now only a small amount of work on constructing $t$-designs from special polynomials has been done, and it is in general hard to determine their parameters. In this paper, we investigate this idea further by using quadratic functions over finite fields, thereby obtain infinite families of $2$-designs, and explicitly determine their parameters. The obtained designs cover some earlier $2$-designs as special cases. Furthermore, we confirmed Conjecture $3$ in Ding and Tang (arXiv: 1903.07375, 2019).