Perfect state transfer and Cayley presentations

Abstract

We study perfect state transfer on Cayley graphs from the point of view that state transfer is a property of a graph and not of a group. This paper is a bridge between the classical question about isomorphic Cayley graphs of non-isomorphic groups and quantum walks on graphs. We show that a Cayley graph of a group with an abelian subgroup of index two is a Cayley graph of an abelian group under any one of three hypotheses, two drawn from the theory of isomorphic Cayley graphs. A statement of the same kind holds for extraspecial groups: every Cayley graph of an extraspecial $p$-group of order $p^{2n+1}$ with a conjugacy-closed connection set is a Cayley graph of $Z_p^{2n+1}$. From these results we deduce that every explicit construction of perfect state transfer in the six papers we survey, on dihedral, dicyclic, generalized dihedral, $V_{8n}$ and extraspecial $2$-groups, is a non-abelian presentation of an abelian Cayley graph. Moreover, we show that a non-abelian group with an abelian subgroup of index two admits a connected Cayley graph with perfect state transfer if and only if its order is divisible by four. Genuinely non-abelian examples do exist. We prove that, for every odd prime power $q\ge 5$, the $SL(2,q)$ graph of Pantangi and Sin, which they showed to admit perfect state transfer, is a Cayley graph of no abelian group; to our knowledge, this is the first infinite family of Cayley graphs with perfect state transfer provably admitting no abelian Cayley presentation. We also construct an infinite family of Cayley graphs with peak state transfer and determine all regular subgroups of the automorphism group of every member. An appendix records a census of the connected vertex-transitive graphs with perfect state transfer on at most $30$ vertices.