Higgledy-piggledy subspaces and uniform subspace designs

TL;DR

This paper studies arrangements of subspaces with specific intersection properties, establishing bounds on their sizes and exploring their dualities, with implications for subspace design constructions.

Contribution

It introduces new bounds and properties for higgledy-piggledy subspaces and uniform subspace designs, connecting these concepts and providing constructions and tight bounds.

Findings

Established lower bounds for higgledy-piggledy subspace sets.

Demonstrated duality between weak and strong subspace designs.

Showed the tightness of the bounds over algebraically closed fields.

Abstract

In this article, we investigate collections of `well-spread-out' projective (and linear) subspaces. Projective $k$-subspaces in $\mathsf{PG}(d,\mathbb{F})$ are in `higgledy-piggledy arrangement' if they meet each projective subspace of co-dimension $k$ in a generator set of points. We prove that the set $\mathcal{H}$ of higgledy-piggledy $k$-subspaces has to contain more than $\min{|\mathbb{F}|,\sum_{i=0}^k\lfloor\frac{d-k+i}{i+1}\rfloor}$ elements. We also prove that $\mathcal{H}$ has to contain more than $(k+1)\cdot(d-k)$ elements if the field $\mathbb{F}$ is algebraically closed. An $r$-uniform weak $(s,A)$ subspace design is a set of linear subspaces $H_1,..,H_N\le\mathbb{F}^m$ each of rank $r$ such that each linear subspace $W\le\mathbb{F}^m$ of rank $s$ meets at most $A$ among them. This subspace design is an $r$-uniform strong $(s,A)$ subspace design if $\sum_{i=1}^N\mathrm{rank}(H_i\cap W)\le A$ for $\forall W\le\mathbb{F}^m$ of rank $s$. We prove that if $m=r+s$ then the dual ($\{H_1^\bot,...,H_N^\bot\}$) of an $r$-uniform weak (strong) subspace design of parameter $(s,A)$ is an $s$-uniform weak (strong) subspace design of parameter $(r,A)$. We show the connection between uniform weak subspace designs and higgledy-piggledy subspaces proving that $A\ge\min{|\mathbb{F}|,\sum_{i=0}^{r-1}\lfloor\frac{s+i}{i+1}\rfloor}$ for $r$-uniform weak or strong $(s,A)$ subspace designs in $\mathbb{F}^{r+s}$. We show that the $r$-uniform strong $(s,r\cdot s+\binom{r}{2})$ subspace design constructed by Guruswami and Kopprty (based on multiplicity codes) has parameter $A=r\cdot s$ if we consider it as a weak subspace design. We give some similar constructions of weak and strong subspace designs (and higgledy-piggledy subspaces) and prove that the lower bound $(k+1)\cdot(d-k)+1$ over algebraically closed field is tight.