Cops and robbers on directed and undirected abelian Cayley graphs

We show that the cop number of directed and undirected Cayley graphs on abelian groups is in O(root n), where n is the number of vertices, by introducing a refined inductive method. With our method, we improve the previous upper bound on cop number for undirected Cayley graphs on abelian groups, and we establish an upper bound on the cop number of directed Cayley graphs on abelian groups. We also use Cayley graphs on abelian groups to construct new Meyniel extremal families, which contain graphs of every order n with cop number in Theta(root n). (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.