Equitable partitions of regular graphs, and perfect sets in normal Cayley graphs

Abstract

An equitable partition of a graph $\Ga$ is a partition $\{V_1, \ldots, V_m\}$ of its vertex set such that for each pair $i, j$ all vertices in $V_i$ have the same number of neighbours in $V_j$. When $m=2$, $V_1$ is called an $(a, b)$-perfect set in $\Ga$, where $a$ is the number of neighbours in $V_1$ of each vertex in $V_1$, and $b$ is the number of neighbours in $V_1$ of each vertex in $V_2$. In this paper we first derive general necessary conditions for a regular graph to admit two equitable partitions. As a corollary we obtain necessary conditions for the existence of an $(a,b)$-perfect set in a regular graph in terms of an arbitrary equitable partition. With the help of these results we then obtain necessary conditions for the existence of an $(a,b)$-perfect set in a normal Cayley graph in terms of the irreducible characters of the underlying group.