Metacirculants and split weak metacirculants

Abstract

Metacirculants are a rich resource of many families of interesting graphs, and weak metacirculants are generalizations of them. A graph is called a {\em split weak metacirculant} if it has a vertex-transitive split metacyclic automorphism group. In two recent papers, it is shown that a graph of prime power order is a metacirculant if and only if it is a split weak metacirculant. Let $m$ is a positive integer. In this paper, we first give a sufficient condition for the existence of split weak metacirculants of order $m$ which are not metacirculants. This is then used to give a sufficient and necessary condition for the existence of split weak metacirculants of order $n$ which are not metacirculants, where $n$ is a product of two prime-powers. As byproducts, we construct infinitely many split weak metacirculant graphs which are not metacirculant graphs, and answer an open question reported in the literature.