Orthogonal representations of Steiner triple system incidence graphs

The Heawood graph is the point-block incidence graph of the Fano plane (the unique Steiner triple system of order 7). We show that the minimum semidefinite rank of this graph is 10. That is, 10 is the smallest number of complex dimensions in which this graph has a faithful orthogonal representation, i.e., an assignment of a vector to each vertex such that the edges occur between precisely those vertices given non-orthogonal pairs. Some of our techniques extend to the incidence graphs of Steiner triple systems of larger order, and we include some observations and questions about the more general case.