Extremal orthogonal arrays

Abstract

It is known that a Delsarte $t$-design in a $Q$-polynomial association scheme has degree at least $\left \lceil{\frac{t}{2}}\right \rceil $. Following Ionin and Shrikhande who studied combinatorial $(2s-1)$-designs (i.e., Delsarte designs in Johnson association schemes) having exactly $s$ block intersection numbers, we call a Delsarte $(2s-1)$-design with degree $s$ extremal and study extremal orthogonal arrays, which are Delsarte designs in Hamming association schemes. It was shown by Delsarte that a $t$-design with degree $s$ and $t\geq 2s-2$ in a Hamming association scheme induces an $s$-class association scheme. We prove that an extremal orthogonal array gives rise to a fission scheme of the latter one, which has $2s-1$ or $2s$ classes. As a corollary, a new necessary condition for the existence of tight orthogonal arrays of strength $3$ is obtained. Furthermore, as a counterpart to a result of Ionin and Shrikhande, we prove an inequality for Hamming distances in extremal orthogonal arrays. The inequality is tight as shown by examples related to the Golay codes.