Antipodal distance-transitive covers of complete bipartite graphs (Q5961459)

This paper classifies all antipodal distance-transitive covers of complete bipartite graphs (of valency at least 3). Part of the general problem of classifying distance-transitive graphs concerns finding the antipodal covers of known distance-transitive graphs, of which the complete bipartite graphs are an extreme case. For an \(r\)-fold cover of the complete bipartite graph of valency \(k\), it was known that \(r \leq k\), and the case \(r = k\) had been previously classified, but this paper gives a unified treatment for all \(r\), including a small sharpening of the case \(r = k\) (which can arise from certain twisted-field projective planes). The proof depends on the classification of finite simple groups (and the ensuing classification of 2-transitive groups), and breaks into two cases, almost simple versus affine groups. The bulk of the paper concerns the affine case, where the proof involves interpreting the commutator maps in certain \(p\)-groups as bi-additive equivariant forms. The main result is that, besides the ``generic case'' arising from projective geometries, there are three sporadic examples (two in the almost simple case and one in the affine case), and an infinite family of examples with solvable automorphism group (the authors give parameters and other information for this family but they say that ``complete enumeration of this surely large class of graphs could be difficult'').