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Innamorati and Zuanni have provided a combinatorial characterization of Baer and unital cones in PG(3,q). The current paper generalizes these results to arbitrary dimension. Furthermore, these results are extended to hyperoval and maximal arc cones., Comment: 16 pages, 0 figures

If an Fq-linear set LU in a projective space is defined by a vector subspace U which is linear over a proper superfield of Fq, then all of its points have weight at least 2. It is known that the converse of this statement holds for linear sets of rank h in PG(1,q^h) but for linear sets of rank k < h, the converse of this statement is in general no longer true. The first part of this paper studies the relation between the weights of points and the size of a linear set, and introduces the concept of the geometric field of linearity of a linear set. This notion will allow us to show the main theorem, stating that for particular linear sets without points of weight 1, the converse of the above statement still holds as long as we take the geometric field of linearity into account.

An $\mathbb{F}_q$-linear set of rank $k$ on a projective line $\mathrm{PG}(1,q^h)$, containing at least one point of weight one, has size at least $q^{k-1}+1$ (see [J. De Beule and G. Van De Voorde, The minimum size of a linear set, J. Comb. Theory, Ser: A 164 (2019), 109-124.]). The classical example of such a set is given by a club. In this paper, we construct a broad family of linear sets meeting this lower bound, where we are able to prescribe the weight of the heaviest point to any value between $k/2$ and $k-1$. Our construction extends the known examples of linear sets of size $q^{k-1}+1$ in $\mathrm{PG}(1,q^h)$ constructed for $k=h=4$ [G. Bonoli and O. Polverino, $\mathbb{F}_q$-Linear blocking sets in $\mathrm{PG}(2,q^4)$, Innov. Incidence Geom. 2 (2005), 35--56.] and $k=h$ in [G. Lunardon and O. Polverino. Blocking sets of size $q^t+q^{t-1}+1$. J. Comb. Theory, Ser: A 90 (2000), 148-158.]. We determine the weight distribution of the constructed linear sets and describe them as the projection of a subgeometry. For small $k$, we investigate whether all linear sets of size $q^{k-1}+1$ arise from our construction. Finally, we modify our construction to define linear sets of size $q^{k-1}+q^{k-2}+\ldots+q^{k-l}+1$ in $\mathrm{PG}(l,q)$. This leads to new infinite families of small minimal blocking sets which are not of R\'edei type.