Covers and pseudocovers of symmetric graphs

Abstract

We introduce the concept of pseudocover, which is a counterpart of cover, for symmetric graphs. The only known example of pseudocovers of symmetric graphs so far was given by Praeger, Zhou and the first-named author a decade ago, which seems technical and hard to extend to obtain more examples. In this paper, we present a criterion for a symmetric extender of a symmetric graph to be a pseudocover, and then apply it to produce various examples of pseudocovers, including (1) with a single exception, each Praeger–Xu’s graph is a pseudocover of a wreath graph; (2) each connected tetravalent symmetric graph with vertex stabilizer of size divisible by 32 has connected pseudocovers.