arXiv subjects

Cheryl E Praeger

Publications and source records attributed to Cheryl E Praeger.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

Vertex-primitive s-arc-transitive digraphs admitting a Suzuki or Ree group

The investigation of s-arc-transitivity of digraphs can be dated back to 1989 when the third author showed that s can be arbitrarily large if the action on vertices is imprimitive. However, the situation is completely different when the digraph is vertex-primitive and not a directed cycle. In 2017 the second author, Li and Xia constructed the first infinite family of G-vertex-primitive 2-arc-transitive examples, and asked if there is an upper bound on s for G-vertex-primitive s-arc-transitive digraphs w=that are not directed. In 2018 the second author and Xia showed that if there is a largest such value of s then it will occur when G is almost simple. So far it has been shown that s\leq 2 for almost simple groups whose socle is an alternating group or a projective special linear group. The contribution of this paper is to prove that s\leq 1 in the case of the Suzuki and the small Ree groups. We give constructions with s=1 to show that the bound is sharp.

math.GR↗

arXiv2021

Circulant association schemes on triples

Association Schemes and coherent configurations (and the related Bose-Mesner algebra and coherent algebras) are well known in combinatorics with many applications. In the 1990s, Mesner and Bhattacharya introduced a three-dimensional generalisation of association schemes which they called an association scheme on triples (AST) and constructed examples of several families of ASTs. Many of their examples used 2-transitive permutation groups: the non-trivial ternary relations of the ASTs were sets of ordered triples of pairwise distinct points of the underlying set left invariant by the group; and the given permutation group was a subgroup of automorphisms of the AST. In this paper, we consider ASTs that do not necessarily admit 2-transitive groups as automorphism groups but instead a transitive cyclic subgroup of the symmetric group acts as automorphisms. Such ASTs are called circulant ASTs and the corresponding ternary relations are called circulant relations. We give a complete characterisation of circulant ASTs in terms of AST-regular partitions of the underlying set. We also show that a special type of circulant, that we call a thin circulant, plays a key role in describing the structure of circulant ASTs. We outline several open questions.

math.CO↗

arXiv2020

Symmetries of biplanes

In this paper, we first study biplanes $\mathcal{D}$ with parameters $(v,k,2)$, where the block size $k\in\{13,16\}$. These are the smallest parameter values for which a classification is not available. We show that if $k=13$, then either $\mathcal{D}$ is the Aschbacher biplane or its dual, or $Aut(\mathcal{D})$ is a subgroup of the cyclic group of order $3$. In the case where $k=16$, we prove that $|Aut(\mathcal{D})|$ divides $2^{7}\cdot 3^{2}\cdot 5\cdot 7\cdot 11\cdot 13$. We also provide an example of a biplane with parameters $(16,6,2)$ with a flag-transitive and point-primitive subgroup of automorphisms preserving a homogeneous cartesian decomposition. This motivated us to study biplanes with point-primitive automorphism groups preserving a cartesian decomposition. We prove that such an automorphism group is either of affine type (as in the example), or twisted wreath type.

math.GR↗

arXiv2016

Generalised Paley graphs with a product structure

A graph is Cartesian decomposable if it is isomorphic to a Cartesian product of (more than one) strictly smaller graphs, each of which has more than one vertex and admits no such decomposition. These smaller graphs are called the Cartesian-prime factors of the Cartesian decomposition, and were shown, by Sabidussi and Vizing independently, to be uniquely determined up to isomorphism. We characterise by their parameters those generalised Paley graphs which are Cartesian decomposable, and we prove that for such graphs, the Cartesian-prime factors are themselves smaller generalised Paley graphs. This generalises a result of Lim and the second author which deals with the case where all the Cartesian-prime factors are complete graphs. These results contribute to the determination, by parameters, of generalised Paley graphs with automorphism groups larger than the 1-dimensional affine subgroups used to define them.

math.CO↗

arXiv2013

Sporadic neighbour-transitive codes in Johnson graphs

We classify the neighbour-transitive codes in Johnson graphs J(v, k) of minimum distance at least three which admit a neighbour-transitive group of automorphisms that is an almost simple two-transitive group of degree v and does not occur in an infinite family of two-transitive groups. The result of this classification is a table of 22 codes with these properties. Many have relatively large minimum distance in comparison to their length v and number of code words. We construct an additional five neighbour-transitive codes with minimum distance two admitting such a group. All 27 codes are t-designs with t at least two.

math.CO↗