Cayley snarks and almost simple groups (Q1603238)

A Cayley snark is a cubic Cayley graph which does not have a proper edge colouring with three colours. In this paper the existence of Cayley snarks is discussed. So far, no Cayley snarks were found. It is shown that the smallest example of a Cayley snark -- if it exists -- comes from a non-abelian simple group or from a group which has a single non-trivial proper normal subgroup. The subgroup must have index two and must be either simple non-abelian or the direct product of two isomorphic non-abelian simple groups.