Cubic Edge-Transitive Bi-$p$-Metacirculants

Abstract

A graph is said to be a bi-Cayley graph over a group $H$ if it admits $H$ as a group of automorphisms acting semiregularly on its vertices with two orbits. For a prime $p$, we call a bi-Cayley graph over a metacyclic $p$-group a bi-$p$-metacirculant. In this paper, the automorphism group of a connected cubic edge-transitive bi-$p$-metacirculant is characterized for an odd prime $p$, and the result reveals that a connected cubic edge-transitive bi-$p$-metacirculant exists only when $p=3$. Using this, a classification is given of connected cubic edge-transitive bi-Cayley graphs over an inner-abelian metacyclic $3$-group. As a result, we construct the first known infinite family of cubic semisymmetric graphs of order twice a $3$-power.