Page 1 of 22 Jacob Steinhardt Cayley graphs formed by conjugate generating sets of Sn Jacob Steinhardt Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
[email protected] 2538 Oak Valley Drive Vienna, VA, USA 22181 (703)-242-7397 arXiv:0711.3057v1 [math.CO] 20 Nov 2007 Page 2 of 22 Jacob Steinhardt Abstract We investigate subsets of the symmetric group with structure similar to that of a graph. The “trees” of these subsets correspond to minimal conjugate generating sets of the symmetric group. There are two main theorems in this paper. The first is a characterization of minimal conjugate generating sets of Sn. The second is a generalization of a result due to Feng characterizing the automorphism groups of the Cayley graphs formed by certain generating sets composed of cycles. We compute the full automorphism groups subject to a weak condition and conjecture that the characterization still holds without the condition. We also present some computational results in relation to Hamiltonicity of Cayley graphs, including a generalization of the work on quasi-hamiltonicity by Gutin and Yeo to undirected graphs. Key words: Cayley graph, automorphism, transposition, cycle, conjugate, Hamiltonian cycle. Page 3 of 22 Jacob Steinhardt 1 Terminology In this paper, we will let N denote the set 1, 2,...,n . Sn will denote the symmetric group acting { } on n elements with canonical action on N. An will denote the alternating group acting on N. We will use the notation (a1 a2 ... ak1 )(b1 b2 ... bk2 ) . to express a permutation as a product of disjoint cycles. By the support of a permutation we will mean those elements not fixed by the permutation.