We establish the restricted sumset analog of the celebrated conjecture of Sárközy on additive decompositions of the set of nonzero squares over a finite field. More precisely, we show that if $q>13$ is an odd prime power, then the set of nonzero squares in $\mathbb {F}_q$ cannot be written as a restricted sumset $A \hat {+} A$, extending a result of Shkredov. More generally, we study restricted sumsets in multiplicative subgroups over finite fields as well as restricted sumsets in perfect powers (over integers) motivated by a question of Erdős and Moser. We also prove an analog of van Lint–MacWilliams’ conjecture for restricted sumsets, which appears to be the first analogue of Erdős--Ko–Rado theorem in a family of Cayley sum graphs.

We investigate neighbourhood sizes in the enhanced power graph (also known as the cyclic graph) associated with a finite group. In particular, we characterise finite p-groups with the smallest maximum size for neighbourhoods of a nontrivial element in its enhanced power graph.

Using the special value at $u=1$ of Artin–Ihara L-functions, we associate to every $\mathbb {Z}$-cover of a finite connected graph a polynomial, which we call the Ihara polynomial. We show that the number of spanning trees for the finite intermediate graphs of such a cover can be expressed in terms of the Pierce–Lehmer sequence associated to a factor of the Ihara polynomial. This allows us to express the asymptotic growth of the number of spanning trees in terms of the Mahler measure of this polynomial. Specialising to the situation where the base graph is a bouquet or the dumbbell graph gives us back previous results in the literature for circulant and I-graphs (including the generalised Petersen graphs). We also express the p-adic valuation of the number of spanning trees of the finite intermediate graphs in terms of the p-adic Mahler measure of the Ihara polynomial. When applied to a particular $\mathbb {Z}$-cover, our result gives us back Lengyel’s calculation of the p-adic valuations of Fibonacci numbers.

A digraph group is a group defined by non-empty presentation with the property that each relator is of the form $R(x, y)$, where x and y are distinct generators and $R(\cdot , \cdot )$ is determined by some fixed cyclically reduced word $R(a, b)$ that involves both a and b. Associated with each such presentation is a digraph whose vertices correspond to the generators and whose arcs correspond to the relators. In this article, we consider digraph groups for strong digraphs that are digon-free and triangle-free. We classify when the digraph group is finite and show that in these cases it is cyclic, giving its order. We apply this result to the Cayley digraph of the generalized quaternion group, to circulant digraphs, and to Cartesian and direct products of strong digraphs.

Many problems and conjectures in extremal combinatorics concern polynomial inequalities between homomorphism densities of graphs where we allow edges to have real weights. Using the theory of graph limits, we can equivalently evaluate polynomial expressions in homomorphism densities on kernels W, that is, symmetric, bounded and measurable functions W from $[0,1]^2 \to \mathbb {R}$. In 2011, Hatami and Norin proved a fundamental result that it is undecidable to determine the validity of polynomial inequalities in homomorphism densities for graphons (i.e., the case where the range of W is $[0,1]$, which corresponds to unweighted graphs or, equivalently, to graphs with edge weights between $0$ and $1$). The corresponding problem for more general sets of kernels, for example, for all kernels or for kernels with range $[-1,1]$, remains open. For any $a> 0$, we show undecidability of polynomial inequalities for any set of kernels which contains all kernels with range $\{0,a\}$. This result also answers a question raised by Lovász about finding computationally effective certificates for the validity of homomorphism density inequalities in kernels.

It is well known that the edge ideal $I(G)$ of a simple graph G has linear quotients if and only if $G^c$ is chordal. We investigate when the property of having linear quotients is inherited by homological shift ideals of an edge ideal. We will see that adding a cluster to the graph $G^c$ when $I(G)$ has homological linear quotients results in a graph with the same property. In particular, $I(G)$ has homological linear quotients when $G^c$ is a block graph. We also show that adding pinnacles to trees preserves the property of having homological linear quotients for the edge ideal of their complements. Furthermore, $I(G)$ has homological linear quotients for every graph G such that $G^c$ is a $\lambda $-minimal chordal graph.

It is proved that Tutte’s $3$-flow conjecture is true for Cayley graphs on groups of order $8p$ where p is an odd prime.

Let $\ell $ be a prime number. The Iwasawa theory of multigraphs is the systematic study of growth patterns in the number of spanning trees in abelian $\ell $-towers of multigraphs. In this context, growth patterns are realized by certain analogs of Iwasawa invariants, which depend on the prime $\ell $ and the abelian $\ell $-tower of multigraphs. We formulate and study statistical questions about the behavior of the Iwasawa $\mu $ and $\lambda $ invariants.

We study Cayley graphs of abelian groups from the perspective of quantum symmetries. We develop a general strategy for determining the quantum automorphism groups of such graphs. Applying this procedure, we find the quantum symmetries of the halved cube graph, the folded cube graph, and the Hamming graphs.

The celebrated Erdős–Ko–Rado (EKR) theorem for Paley graphs of square order states that all maximum cliques are canonical in the sense that each maximum clique arises from the subfield construction. Recently, Asgarli and Yip extended this result to Peisert graphs and other Cayley graphs which are Peisert-type graphs with nice algebraic properties on the connection set. On the other hand, there are Peisert-type graphs for which the EKR theorem fails to hold. In this article, we show that the EKR theorem of Paley graphs extends to almost all pseudo-Paley graphs of Peisert-type. Furthermore, we establish the stability results of the same flavor.

A subset R of the vertex set of a graph $\Gamma $ is said to be $(\kappa ,\tau )$-regular if R induces a $\kappa $-regular subgraph and every vertex outside R is adjacent to exactly $\tau $ vertices in R. In particular, if R is a $(\kappa ,\tau )$-regular set of some Cayley graph on a finite group G, then R is called a $(\kappa ,\tau )$-regular set of G. Let H be a nontrivial normal subgroup of G, and $\kappa $ and $\tau $ a pair of integers satisfying $0\leq \kappa \leq |H|-1$, $1\leq \tau \leq |H|$ and $\gcd (2,|H|-1)\mid \kappa $. It is proved that (i) if $\tau $ is even, then H is a $(\kappa ,\tau )$-regular set of G; (ii) if $\tau $ is odd, then H is a $(\kappa ,\tau )$-regular set of G if and only if it is a $(0,1)$-regular set of G.

Let G be a finite transitive group on a set $\Omega $, let $\alpha \in \Omega $, and let $G_{\alpha }$ be the stabilizer of the point $\alpha $ in G. In this paper, we are interested in the proportion

$$ \begin{align*} \frac{|\{\omega\in \Omega\mid \omega \textrm{ lies in a }G_{\alpha}\textrm{-orbit of cardinality at most 2}\}|}{|\Omega|}, \end{align*} $$

that is, the proportion of elements of $\Omega $ lying in a suborbit of cardinality at most 2. We show that, if this proportion is greater than $5/6$, then each element of $\Omega $ lies in a suborbit of cardinality at most 2, and hence G is classified by a result of Bergman and Lenstra. We also classify the permutation groups attaining the bound $5/6$.

We use these results to answer a question concerning the enumeration of Cayley graphs. Given a transitive group G containing a regular subgroup R, we determine an upper bound on the number of Cayley graphs on R containing G in their automorphism groups.

A $(p,q)$ -colouring of a graph $G$ is an edge-colouring of $G$ which assigns at least $q$ colours to each $p$ -clique. The problem of determining the minimum number of colours, $f(n,p,q)$ , needed to give a $(p,q)$ -colouring of the complete graph $K_n$ is a natural generalization of the well-known problem of identifying the diagonal Ramsey numbers $r_k(p)$ . The best-known general upper bound on $f(n,p,q)$ was given by Erdős and Gyárfás in 1997 using a probabilistic argument. Since then, improved bounds in the cases where $p=q$ have been obtained only for $p\in \{4,5\}$ , each of which was proved by giving a deterministic construction which combined a $(p,p-1)$ -colouring using few colours with an algebraic colouring.

In this paper, we provide a framework for proving new upper bounds on $f(n,p,p)$ in the style of these earlier constructions. We characterize all colourings of $p$ -cliques with $p-1$ colours which can appear in our modified version of the $(p,p-1)$ -colouring of Conlon, Fox, Lee, and Sudakov. This allows us to greatly reduce the amount of case-checking required in identifying $(p,p)$ -colourings, which would otherwise make this problem intractable for large values of $p$ . In addition, we generalize our algebraic colouring from the $p=5$ setting and use this to give improved upper bounds on $f(n,6,6)$ and $f(n,8,8)$ .

Let $\Gamma $ be a graph of valency at least four whose automorphism group contains a minimally vertex-transitive subgroup G. It is proved that $\Gamma $ admits a nowhere-zero $3$ -flow if one of the following two conditions holds: (i) $\Gamma $ is of order twice an odd number and G contains a central involution; (ii) G is a direct product of a $2$ -subgroup and a subgroup of odd order.

How many 2-cells must two finite CW-complexes have to admit a common, but not finite common, covering? Leighton’s theorem says that both complexes must have 2-cells. We construct an almost (?) minimal example with two 2-cells in each complex.

We determine all finite sets of equiangular lines spanning finite-dimensional complex unitary spaces for which the action on the lines of the set-stabiliser in the unitary group is 2-transitive with a regular normal subgroup.

We give a sufficient and necessary condition for a Praeger–Xu graph to be a Cayley graph.

A connected, locally finite graph $\Gamma $ is a Cayley–Abels graph for a totally disconnected, locally compact group G if G acts vertex-transitively on $\Gamma $ with compact, open vertex stabilizers. Define the minimal degree of G as the minimal degree of a Cayley–Abels graph of G. We relate the minimal degree in various ways to the modular function, the scale function and the structure of compact open subgroups. As an application, we prove that if $T_{d}$ denotes the d-regular tree, then the minimal degree of $\mathrm{Aut}(T_{d})$ is d for all $d\geq 2$ .