Characterisations of Elementary Pseudo-Caps and Good Eggs

Abstract

In this note, we use the theory of Desarguesian spreads to investigate good eggs. Thas showed that an egg in $PG(4n-1,q)$, $q$ odd, with two good elements is elementary. By a short combinatorial argument, we show that a similar statement holds for large pseudo-caps, in odd and even characteristic. As a corollary, this improves and extends the result of Thas, Thas and Van Maldeghem (2006) where one needs at least $4$ good elements of an egg in even characteristic to obtain the same conclusion. We rephrase this corollary to obtain a characterisation of the generalised quadrangle $T_3(O)$ of Tits. Lavrauw (2005) characterises elementary eggs in odd characteristic as those good eggs containing a space that contains at least $5$ elements of the egg, but not the good element. We provide an adaptation of this characterisation for weak eggs in odd and even characteristic. As a corollary, we obtain a direct geometric proof for the theorem of Lavrauw.