On Arc-Transitive Metacyclic Covers of Graphs with Order Twice a Prime

Abstract

Quite a lot of attention has been paid recently to the characterization and construction of edge- or arc-transitive abelian (mostly cyclic or elementary abelian) covers of symmetric graphs, but there are rare results for nonabelian covers since the voltage graph techniques are generally not easy to be used in this case. In this paper, we will classify certain metacyclic arc-transitive covers of all non-complete symmetric graphs with prime valency and twice a prime order $2p$ (involving the complete bipartite graph ${\sf K}_{p,p}$, the Petersen graph, the Heawood graph, the Hadamard design on $22$ points and an infinite family of prime-valent arc-regular graphs of dihedral groups). A few previous results are extended.