Regular automorphism groups on partial geometries

Abstract

Recently, Ghinelli (Geom Dedicata (1992) 165-174) had studied the generalized quadrangles which admits automorphism groups acting regularly on the points. In this paper, we generalize her idea to partial geometries, pg(s + 1, t + 1, α). Some examples and basic properties are given. In particular, we prove that under certain conditions on the automorphism group and the lines, such a geometry is a translation net. Applying the results to the case when s = t and the automorphism group G is abelian, we find that either the geometry is a translation net or all the lines of the geometry are generated by a subset of G. Also, for this case, we conjecture that the parameter α is either s or s + 1, except (s, α) = (5, 2), and we have checked that it is true for s ≤ 500.