On extremal orthogonal arrays

An orthogonal array with parameters \((N,n,q,t)\) (\(OA(N,n,q,t)\) for short) is an \(N\times n\) matrix with entries from the alphabet \(\{1,2,...,q\}\) such that in any of its \(t\) columns, all possible row vectors of length \(t\) occur equally often. Rao showed the following lower bound on \(N\) for \(OA(N,n,q,2e)\):
\[ N\geq \sum_{k=0}^e \binom{n}{k}(q-1)^k, \]
and an orthogonal array is said to be complete or tight if it achieves equality in this bound. It is known by Delsarte (1973) that for complete orthogonal arrays \(OA(N,n,q,2e)\), the number of Hamming distances between distinct two rows is \(e\). One of the classical problems is to classify complete orthogonal arrays.

We call an orthogonal array \(OA(N,n,q,2e-1)\) extremal if the number of Hamming distances between distinct two rows is \(e\). In this talk, we review the classification problem of complete orthogonal arrays with our contribution to the case \(t=4\) and show how to extend it to extremal orthogonal arrays. Moreover, we give a result for extremal orthogonal arrays which is a counterpart of a result in block designs by Ionin and Shrikhande in 1993.