Ramsey numbers and extremal structures in polar spaces

Abstract: We use $p$-rank bounds on partial ovoids and the classical bounds on Ramsey numbers to obtain upper bounds on the size of partial $m$-ovoids in finite classical polar spaces. These bounds imply non-existence of $m$-ovoids for new infinite families of polar spaces. We also give a probabilistic construction of large partial $m$-ovoids when $m$ grows linearly with the rank of the polar space. In the special case of the symplectic spaces over the binary field, we prove an equivalence between partial $m$-ovoids and a generalisation of Oddtown families from extremal set theory that has been studied under the name of $m$-nearly orthogonal sets. We give a new construction for large partial $2$-ovoids in these spaces and thus $2$-nearly orthogonal sets over the binary field. This construction uses triangle-free graphs associated to certain BCH codes whose complements have low $2$-rank and it gives an asymptotic improvement over the previous best construction. We give another construction of triangle-free graphs using a binary projective cap, which has low complementary rank over the reals. This improves the bounds in the recently introduced rank-Ramsey problem and it gives better constructions of large partial $m$-ovoids for $m > 2$ in the binary symplectic space.