Uniformity in association schemes and coherent configurations: cometric Q-antipodal schemes and linked systems

Inspired by some intriguing examples, we study uniform association schemes and uniform coherent configurations, including cometric Q-antipodal association schemes. After a review of imprimitivity, we show that an imprimitive association scheme is uniform if and only if it is dismantlable, and we cast these schemes in the broader context of certain --- uniform --- coherent configurations. We also give a third characterization of uniform schemes in terms of the Krein parameters, and derive information on the primitive idempotents of such a scheme. In the second half of the paper, we apply these results to cometric association schemes. We show that each such scheme is uniform if and only if it is Q-antipodal, and derive results on the parameters of the subschemes and dismantled schemes of cometric Q-antipodal schemes. We revisit the correspondence between uniform indecomposable three-class schemes and linked systems of symmetric designs, and show that these are cometric Q-antipodal. We obtain a characterization of cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes in terms of only a few parameters, and show that any strongly regular graph with a ("non-exceptional") strongly regular decomposition gives rise to such a scheme. Hemisystems in generalized quadrangles provide interesting examples of such decompositions. We finish with a short discussion of five-class schemes as well as a list of all feasible parameter sets for cometric Q-antipodal four-class schemes with at most six fibres and fibre size at most 2000, and describe the known examples. Most of these examples are related to groups, codes, and geometries.Comment: 42 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Published version, minor revisions, April 201

Perfect state transfer, graph products and equitable partitions

We describe new constructions of graphs which exhibit perfect state transfer on continuous-time quantum walks. Our constructions are based on variants of the double cones [BCMS09,ANOPRT10,ANOPRT09] and the Cartesian graph products (which includes the n-cube) [CDDEKL05]. Some of our results include: (1) If $G$ is a graph with perfect state transfer at time $t_{G}$, where t_{G}\Spec(G) \subseteq \ZZ\pi, and $H$ is a circulant with odd eigenvalues, their weak product $G \times H$ has perfect state transfer. Also, if $H$ is a regular graph with perfect state transfer at time $t_{H}$ and $G$ is a graph where t_{H}|V_{H}|\Spec(G) \subseteq 2\ZZ\pi, their lexicographic product $G[H]$ has perfect state transfer. (2) The double cone $\overline{K}_{2} + G$ on any connected graph $G$, has perfect state transfer if the weights of the cone edges are proportional to the Perron eigenvector of $G$. This generalizes results for double cone on regular graphs studied in [BCMS09,ANOPRT10,ANOPRT09]. (3) For an infinite family \GG of regular graphs, there is a circulant connection so the graph K_{1}+\GG\circ\GG+K_{1} has perfect state transfer. In contrast, no perfect state transfer exists if a complete bipartite connection is used (even in the presence of weights) [ANOPRT09]. We also describe a generalization of the path collapsing argument [CCDFGS03,CDDEKL05], which reduces questions about perfect state transfer to simpler (weighted) multigraphs, for graphs with equitable distance partitions.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure