Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

A graph is ``strongly regular'' (SRG) if it is $k$-regular, and every pair of adjacent (resp. nonadjacent) vertices has exactly $\lambda$ (resp. $\mu$) common neighbors. Paradoxically, the high degree of regularity in SRGs inhibits their symmetry. Although the line-graphs of the complete graph and complete bipartite graph give examples of SRGs with $\exp(\Omega(\sqrt{n}))$ automorphisms, where $n$ is the number of vertices, all other SRGs have much fewer---the best bound is currently $\exp(\tilde{O}(n^{9/37}))$ (Chen--Sun--Teng, 2013), and Babai conjectures that in fact all primitive SRGs besides the two exceptional line-graph families have only quasipolynomially-many automorphisms. In joint work with Babai, Chen, Sun, and Teng, we make progress toward this conjecture by giving a quasipolynomial bound on the number of automorphisms for valencies $k > n^{5/6}$. Our proof relies on bounds on the vertex expansion of SRGs to show that a polylogarithmic number of randomly chosen vertices form a base for the automorphism group with high probability.