David Roberson, Homomorphisms of Strongly Regular Graphs

A homomorphism is an adjacency preserving map between the vertex sets of two graphs. A n-vertex, k-regular graph is strongly regular, with parameters (n,k,λ, μ), if there exist numbers λ and μ such that every pair of adjacent vertices share λ common neighbors and every pair of non-adjacent vertices share μ common neighbors. A strongly regular graph is primitive if neither it nor its complement is a disjoint union of complete graphs. We prove that if G and H are primitive strongly regular graphs with the same parameters and φ is a homomorphism from G to H, then φ is either an isomorphism or a coloring (homomorphism to a complete subgraph). Moreover, any such coloring is optimal for G and its image is a maximum clique of H. Therefore, the only endomorphisms of a primitive strongly regular graph are automorphisms or colorings. This confirms and strengthens a conjecture of Peter Cameron and Priscila Kazanidis that all strongly regular graphs are cores or have complete cores. The proof of the result is elementary, mainly relying on linear algebraic techniques.