Spreads in Strongly Regular Graphs

A spread of a strongly regular graph is a partitionof the vertex set into cliques that meet Delsarte's bound (alsocalled Hoffman's bound). Such spreads give rise to coloringsmeeting Hoffman's lower bound for the chromatic number and tocertain imprimitive three-class association schemes. These correspondenceslead to conditions for existence. Most examples come from spreadsand fans in (partial) geometries. We give other examples, includinga spread in the McLaughlin graph. For strongly regular graphsrelated to regular two-graphs, spreads give lower bounds forthe number of non-isomorphic strongly regular graphs in the switchingclass of the regular two-graph.