Weak metacirculants of odd prime power order

Metacirculants are a basic and well-studied family of vertex-transitive graphs, and weak metacirculants are generalizations of them. A graph is called a weak metacirculant if it has a vertex-transitive metacyclic automorphism group. This paper is devoted to the study of weak metacirculants with odd prime power order. We first prove that a weak metacirculant of odd prime power order is a metacirculant if and only if it has a vertex-transitive split metacyclic automorphism group. We then prove that for any odd prime $p$ and integer $\ell\geq 4$, there exist weak metacirculants of order $p^\ell$ which are Cayley graphs but not Cayley graphs of any metacyclic group; this answers a question in Li et al. (2013). We construct such graphs explicitly by introducing a construction which is a generalization of generalized Petersen graphs. Finally, we determine all smallest possible metacirculants of odd prime power order which are Cayley graphs but not Cayley graphs of any metacyclic group.