Semiregular Automorphisms of Cubic Vertex-Transitive Graphs and the Abelian Normal Quotient Method

Abstract

We characterise connected cubic graphs admitting a vertex-transitive group of automorphisms with an abelian normal subgroup that is not semiregular. We illustrate the utility of this result by using it to prove that the order of a semiregular subgroup of maximum order in a vertex-transitive group of automorphisms of a connected cubic graph grows with the order of the graph.