Tetravalent half-arc-transitive graphs with unbounded nonabelian vertex stabilizers

Half-arc-transitive graphs are a fascinating topic which connects graph theory, Riemann surfaces and group theory. Although fruitful results have been obtained over the last half a century, it is still challenging to construct half-arc-transitive graphs with prescribed vertex stabilizers. Until recently, there have been only six known connected tetravalent half-arc-transitive graphs with nonabelian vertex stabilizers, and the question whether there exists a connected tetravalent half-arc-transitive graph with nonabelian vertex stabilizer of order $2^s$ for every $s\geqslant3$ has been wide open. This question is answered in the affirmative in this paper via the construction of a connected tetravalent half-arc-transitive graph with vertex stabilizer $\mathrm{D}_8^2\times\mathrm{C}_2^m$ for each integer $m\geqslant1$, where $\mathrm{D}_8^2$ is the direct product of two copies of the dihedral group of order $8$ and $\mathrm{C}_2^m$ is the direct product of $m$ copies of the cyclic group of order $2$. The graphs constructed have surprisingly many significant properties in various contexts.