Half-Transitive Graphs of Prime-Cube Order

We call an undirected graph X half-transitive if the automorphism group Aut X of X acts transitively on the vertex set and edge set but not on the set of ordered pairs of adjacent vertices of X. In this paper we determine all half-transitive graphs of order p ³ and degree 4, where p is an odd prime; namely, we prove that all such graphs are Cayley graphs on the non-Abelian group of order p ³ and exponent p ², and up to isomorphism there are exactly (p – 1)/2 such graphs. As a byproduct, this proves the uniqueness of Holt's half-transitive graph with 27 vertices.