Normal Cayley digraphs of dihedral groups with CI-property

Abstract

A Cayley (di)graph $Cay(G,S)$ of a group $G$ with respect to $S$ is said to be normal if the right regular representation of $G$ is normal in the automorphism group of $Cay(G,S)$, and is called a CI-(di)graph if there is $\alpha\in Aut(G)$ such that $S^\alpha=T$, whenever $Cay(G,S)\cong Cay(G,T)$ for a Cayley (di)graph $Cay(G,T)$. A finite group $G$ is called a DCI-group or a NDCI-group if all Cayley digraphs or normal Cayley digraphs of $G$ are CI-digraphs, and is called a CI-group or a NCI-group if all Cayley graphs or normal Cayley graphs of $G$ are CI-graphs, respectively. Motivated by a conjecture proposed by \'Ad\'am in 1967, CI-groups and DCI-groups have been actively studied during the last fifty years by many researchers in algebraic graph theory. It takes about thirty years to obtain the classification of cyclic CI-groups and DCI-groups, and recently, the first two authors, among others, classified cyclic NCI-groups and NDCI-groups. Even though there are many partial results on dihedral CI-groups and DCI-groups, their classification is still elusive. In this paper, we prove that a dihedral group of order $2n$ is a NCI-group or a NDCI-group if and only if $n=2,4$ or $n$ is odd. As a direct consequence, we have that if a dihedral group $D_{2n}$ of order $2n$ is a DCI-group then $n=2$ or $n$ is odd-square-free, and that if $D_{2n}$ is a CI-group then $n=2,9$ or $n$ is odd-square-free, throwing some new light on classification of dihedral CI-groups and DCI-groups.