Transitive Deficiency One Parallelisms of PG(3, 7)

Abstract

Consider the n-dimensional projective space PG(n,q) over a finite field with q elements. A spread in PG(n,q) is a set of lines which partition the point set. A parallelism is a partition of the set of lines by spreads. A deficiency one parallelism is a partial parallelism with one spread less than the parallelism. A transitive deficiency one parallelism corresponds to a parallelism possessing an automorphism group which fixes one spread and is transitive on the remaining spreads. Such parallelisms have been considered in many papers. As a result, an infinite family of transitive deficiency one parallelisms of PG(n,q) has been constructed for odd q, and it has been proved that the deficiency spread of a transitive deficiency one parallelism must be regular, and its automorphism group should contain an elation subgroup of order q2. In the present paper we construct parallelisms of PG(3,7) invariant under an elation group of order 49 with some additional properties, and thus we succeed to obtain all (46) transitive deficiency one parallelisms of PG(3,7). The three parallelisms from the known infinite family are among them. As a by-product, we also construct a much bigger number (55,022) of parallelisms which have the same spread structure, but are not transitive deficiency one.

Keywords

• finite projective space
• parallelism
• automorphism
• transitive group
• deficiency one