On the Automorphism Group of a Graph

Wenxue Du

Published 2016-07-02Version 1

An automorphism of a graph $G$ with $n$ vertices is a bijective map $\phi$ from $V(G)$ to itself such that $\phi(v_i)\phi(v_j)\in E(G)$ $\Leftrightarrow$ $v_i v_j\in E(G)$ for any two vertices $v_i$ and $v_j$ of $G$. Denote by $\mathfrak{G}$ the group consisting of all automorphisms of $G$. As well-known, the structure of the action of $\mathfrak{G}$ on $V(G)$ is represented definitely by its block systems. On the other hand for each permutation $\sigma$ on $[n]$, there is a natural action on any vector $\pmb{v}=(v_1,v_2,\ldots,v_n)^t\in \mathbb{R}^n$ such that $\sigma\pmb{v}=(v_{\sigma^{-1}1},v_{\sigma^{-1}2},\ldots,v_{\sigma^{-1} n})^t$. Accordingly, we actually have a permutation representation of $\mathfrak{G}$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$. In this paper, we establish the some connections between block systems of $\mathfrak{G}$ and its irreducible representations, and by virtue of that we finally devise an algorithm outputting a generating set and all block systems of $\mathfrak{G}$ within time $n^{C \log n}$ for some constant $C$.