Amorphic association schemes from bent partitions

Abstract

Bent partitions are partitions of an elementary abelian group, which have similarities to partitions from spreads. In fact, a spread partition is a special case of a bent partition. In particular, bent partitions give rise to a large number of (vectorial) bent functions. Examples of bent partitions, which generalize the Desarguesian spread, have been presented by Anbar, Meidl and Pirsic, 2021, 2022. Bent partitions, which generalize some other classes of (pre)semifield spreads, have been presented by Anbar, Kalaycı, Meidl 2023. In this article, it is shown that these bent partitions induce (pk+1)-class amorphic associations schemes on Fpm×Fpm, where k is a divisor of m with special properties. This implies a construction of amorphic association schemes from some classes of (pre)semifields.