Combinatorial constructions of packings in Grassmannian spaces

The problem of packing n-dimensional subspaces of m-dimensional Euclidean space such that these subspaces are as far apart as possible was introduced by Conway, Hardin and Sloane. It can be seen as a higher dimensional version of spherical codes or equiangular lines. In this paper, we first give a general construction of equiangular lines, and then present a family of equiangular lines with large size from direct product difference sets. Meanwhile, for packing higher dimensional subspaces, we give three constructions of optimal packings in Grassmannian spaces based on difference sets and Latin squares. As a consequence, we obtain many new classes of optimal Grassmannian packings.