There is no anti-cocircular pair of ovoids in PG(3,8)
Two ovoids O1, O2 of PG(3,q) form an anti-cocircular pair if there is a bijection φ: O1 → O2 such that no four coplanar points of O1 have coplanar images. Such pairs are the two-row covering perfect hash families CPHF(2; q^2+1, q, 4) of maximal length. They exist for q=4 and not for odd q ≥ 7, and Bai XunDi asked whether they exist for infinitely many even q, the case q=8 being open. We show that there is none for q=8: neither the elliptic quadric nor the Tits ovoid of PG(3,8) contains 8 points with no four coplanar, while the image of a plane section of O1 would be 9 such points in O2. The proof uses the classification of the ovoids of PG(3,8) and an exhaustive computation, done by two independent programs. For every q=2^h ≥ 8 we also prove that neither ovoid of an anti-cocircular pair can be an elliptic quadric or a Tits ovoid. With the known classifications of ovoids, this shows that there is no anti-cocircular pair for q=16, 32, 64 either. The archive contains the programs and the data behind the arc counts.
Authors
- Theo Nicolas Sitjar (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6728-0169)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-11-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24139335
- Primary Topic
- Advanced Combinatorial Mathematics
- Type
- preprint