On the spectral gap and the automorphism group of distance-regular graphs

Abstract

We prove that a distance-regular graph with a dominant distance is a spectral expander. The key ingredient of the proof is a new inequality on the intersection numbers. We use the spectral gap bound to study the structure of the automorphism group.The minimal degree of a permutation group G is the minimum number of points not fixed by non-identity elements of G. Lower bounds on the minimal degree have strong structural consequences on G. In 2014 Babai proved that the automorphism group of a strongly regular graph with n vertices has minimal degree ≥cn, with known exceptions. Strongly regular graphs correspond to distance-regular graphs of diameter 2. Babai conjectured that Hamming and Johnson graphs are the only primitive distance-regular graphs of diameter d≥3 whose automorphism group has sublinear minimal degree. We confirm this conjecture for non-geometric primitive distance-regular graphs of bounded diameter. We also show if the primitivity assumption is removed, then only one additional family of exceptions arises, the crown graphs. We settle the geometric case in a companion paper.