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JOURNAL OF
ALGEBRAIC
COMBINATORICS

  Editors-in-chief: C. A. Athanasiadis, T. Lam, A. Munemasa, H. Van Maldeghem
ISSN 0925-9899 (print) • ISSN 1572-9192 (electronic)
 

Triangle-free distance-regular graphs

Yeh-jong Pan , Min-hsin Lu and Chih-wen Weng
National Chiao Tung University Department of Applied Mathematics 1001 Ta Hsueh Road Hsinchu Taiwan 30010 Taiwan

DOI: 10.1007/s10801-007-0072-5

Abstract

Let Γ  denote a distance-regular graph with diameter d\geq 3. By a parallelogram of length 3, we mean a 4-tuple xyzw consisting of vertices of Γ  such that
tial 
( x, y)=
tial 
( z, w)=1,
tial 
( x, z)=3, and
tial 
( x, w)=
tial 
( y, w)=
tial 
( y, z)=2, where
tial 
denotes the path-length distance function. Assume that Γ  has intersection numbers a 1=0 and a 2\neq 0. We prove that the following (i) and (ii) are equivalent. (i) Γ  is Q-polynomial and contains no parallelograms of length 3; (ii) Γ  has classical parameters ( d, b, α , β ) with b< - 1. Furthermore, suppose that (i) and (ii) hold. We show that each of b( b+1) 2( b+2)/ c 2, ( b - 2)( b - 1) b( b+1)/(2+2 b -  c 2) is an integer and that c 2\leq  b( b+1). This upper bound for c 2 is optimal, since the Hermitian forms graph Her 2( d) is a triangle-free distance-regular graph that satisfies c 2= b( b+1).

Pages: 23–34

Keywords: keywords distance-regular graph; $Q$-polynomial; classical parameters

Full Text: PDF

References

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