Uniformity in association schemes and coherent configurations: Cometric Q-antipodal schemes and linked systems

Inspired by some intriguing examples, we study uniform association schemes and uniform coherent configurations. Perhaps the most important subclass of these objects is the class of cometric Q-antipodal association schemes. The concept of a cometric association scheme (the dual version of a distance-regular graph) is well-known; however, until recently it has not been studied well outside the area of distance-regular graphs. Uniformity is a concept introduced by Higman, but this likewise has not been well-studied. After a review of imprimitivity, we show that an imprimitive association scheme is uniform if and only if it is dismantlable, and we cast these schemes in the broader context of certain — uniform — coherent configurations. We also give a third characterization of uniform schemes in terms of the Krein parameters, and derive information on the primitive idempotents of such a scheme. In the second half of the paper, we apply these results to cometric association schemes. We show that each such scheme is uniform if and only if it is Q-antipodal, and derive results on the parameters of the subschemes and dismantled schemes of cometric Q-antipodal schemes. We revisit the correspondence between uniform indecomposable three-class schemes and linked systems of symmetric designs, and show that these are cometric Q-antipodal. We obtain a characterization of cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes in terms of only a few parameters, and show that any strongly regular graph with a (“non-exceptional”) strongly regular decomposition gives rise to such a scheme. Hemisystems in generalized quadrangles provide interesting examples of such decompositions. We finish with a short discussion of five-class schemes as well as a list of all feasible parameter sets for cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes with at most six fibres and fibre size at most 2000, and describe the known examples.