On the Existence of Small Strictly Neumaier Graphs

A Neumaier graph is a non-complete edge-regular graph containing a regular clique. In this work, we prove several results on the existence of small strictly Neumaier graphs. In particular, we present a theoretical proof of the uniqueness of the smallest strictly Neumaier graph with parameters (16, 9, 4; 2, 4), we establish the existence of a strictly Neumaier graph with parameters (25, 12, 5; 2, 5), and we disprove the existence of strictly Neumaier graphs with parameters (25, 16, 9; 3, 5), (28, 18, 11; 4, 7), (33, 24, 17; 6, 9), (35, 2212; 3, 5), (40, 30, 22; 7, 10) and (55, 34, 18; 3, 5). Our proofs use combinatorial techniques and a novel application of integer programming methods.