Automorphisms of coverings of strongly regular graphs with parameters (81,20,1,6) (Q736201)

A strongly-regular graph is a distance-regular graph of diameter 2; its parameters \((v,k,\lambda,\mu)\) denote, respectively, the number of vertices, the (constant) valence, the number of common neighbors of any pair of adjacent vertices, and the number of common neighbors of any pair of nonadjacent vertices. In this paper the authors study the automorphisms of distance-regular graphs \(\Gamma\) that can be \(r\)-coverings of the (unique) strongly regular graph with parameters \((81,20,1,6)\). The diameter of \(\Gamma\) may be 4 or 5, and very detailed theorems are presented in three cases of diameter 4, concluding with the following corollary. Let \(\Gamma\) be a distance-regular graph of diameter 4 that is an \(r\)-covering of the strongly-regular graph with parameters \((81,20,1,6)\), where \(r\in\{2,3,6\}\). If \(\Gamma\) is vertex-transitive, then \(r=3\).