On the largest conjugacy class length of a finite group

Let $G$ be a finite group and $\mathrm{bcl}(G)$ the largest conjugacy class length of $G$ . In this note we slightly improve He and Shi’s lower bound for $\mathrm{bcl}(G)$ , showing that $|\mathrm{bcl}(G)|\ge p^{\frac{1}{p}}(|G:O_{p}(G)|_{p})^{\frac{p-1}{p}}$ .     

Homogeneous almost quaternion-Hermitian manifolds

An almost quaternion-Hermitian structure on a Riemannian manifold $(M^{4n},g)$ is a reduction of the structure group of $M$ to $\mathrm{Sp}(n)\mathrm{Sp}(1)\subset \text{ SO }(4n)$ . In this paper we show that a compact simply connected homogeneous almost quaternion-Hermitian manifold of non-vanishing Euler characteristic is either a Wolf space, or $\mathbb{S }^2\times \mathbb{S }^2$ , or the complex quadric $\text{ SO }(7)/\mathrm{U}(3)$ .     

Biharmonic maps from a complete Riemannian manifold into a non-positively curved manifold

We consider biharmonic maps $\phi :(M,g)\rightarrow (N,h)$ from a complete Riemannian manifold into a Riemannian manifold with non-positive sectional curvature. Assume that $ p $ satisfies $ 2\le p <\infty $ . If for such a $ p $ , $\int _M|\tau (\phi )|^{ p }\,\mathrm{d}v_g<\infty $ and $\int _M|\,\mathrm{d}\phi |^2\,\mathrm{d}v_g<\infty ,$ where $\tau (\phi )$ is the tension field of $\phi $ , then we show that $\phi $ is harmonic. For a biharmonic submanifold, we obtain that the above assumption $\int _M|\,\mathrm{d}\phi |^2\,\mathrm{d}v_g<\infty $ is not necessary. These results give affirmative partial answers to the global version of generalized Chen’s conjecture.     

On the Hall algebra of semigroup representations over \mathbb F _1

Let $\mathrm{A }$ be a finitely generated semigroup with 0. An $\mathrm{A }$ -module over $\mathbb F _1$ (also called an $\mathrm{A }$ -set), is a pointed set $(M,*)$ together with an action of $\mathrm{A }$ . We define and study the Hall algebra $\mathbb H _{\mathrm{A }}$ of the category $\mathcal C _{\mathrm{A }}$ of finite $\mathrm{A }$ -modules. $\mathbb H _{\mathrm{A }}$ is shown to be the universal enveloping algebra of a Lie algebra $\mathfrak n _{\mathrm{A }}$ , called the Hall Lie algebra of $\mathcal C _{\mathrm{A }}$ . In the case of $\langle t \rangle $ —the free monoid on one generator $\langle t \rangle $ , the Hall algebra (or more precisely the Hall algebra of the subcategory of nilpotent $\langle t \rangle $ -modules) is isomorphic to Kreimer’s Hopf algebra of rooted forests. This perspective allows us to define two new commutative operations on rooted forests. We also consider the examples when $\mathrm{A }$ is a quotient of $\langle t \rangle $ by a congruence, and the monoid $G \cup \{ 0\}$ for a finite group $G$ .     

Characterization of projective linear groups by the order of the normalizer of a Sylow subgroup

Let $r$ be a prime and $G$ be a finite group, and let $R, \,S$ be Sylow $r$ -subgroups of $G$ and $\text{ PGL }(2, r)$ respectively. We prove the following results: (1) If $|G|=|\text{ PGL }(2, r)|$ and $|N_{G}(R)|=|N_{\mathrm{PGL}(2, r)} (S)|$ and $r$ is not a Mersenne prime, then $G$ is isomorphic to $\text{ PSL } (2, r) \times C_{2}, \,\text{ SL }(2, r)$ or $\text{ PGL }(2, r)$ . (2) If $|G|=|\text{ PGL }(2, r)|, \,|N_{G}(R)|=|N_{\mathrm{PGL}(2, r)}(S)|$ where $r>3$ is a Mersenne prime and $r$ is an isolated vertex of the prime graph of $G$ , then $G\cong \text{ PGL }(2, r)$ .     

Characterization of some simple groups by the multiplicity pattern

Let $G$ be a finite group and let ${\mathrm{Irr}}(G)$ denote the set of all complex irreducible characters of $G.$ Let ${\mathrm{cd}}(G)$ be the set of all character degrees of $G.$ For each positive integer $d,$ the multiplicity of $d$ in $G$ is defined to be the number of irreducible characters of $G$ having the same degree $d.$ The multiplicity pattern ${\mathrm{mp}}(G)$ is the vector whose first coordinate is $|G:G^{\prime }|$ and for $i\ge 1,$ the $(i+1)$ th-coordinate of ${\mathrm{mp}}(G)$ is the multiplicity of the $i$ th-smallest nontrivial character degree of $G.$ In this paper, we show that every nonabelian simple group with at most $7$ distinct character degrees is uniquely determined by the multiplicity pattern.     

Modular categories associated with unipotent groups

Let $G$ be a unipotent algebraic group over an algebraically closed field $\mathtt{k }$ of characteristic $p>0$ and let $l\ne p$ be another prime. Let $e$ be a minimal idempotent in $\mathcal{D }_G(G)$ , the $\overline{\mathbb{Q }}_l$ -linear triangulated braided monoidal category of $G$ -equivariant (for the conjugation action) $\overline{\mathbb{Q }}_l$ -complexes on $G$ under convolution (with compact support) of complexes. Then, by a construction due to Boyarchenko and Drinfeld, we can associate to $G$ and $e$ a modular category $\mathcal{M }_{G,e}$ . In this paper, we prove that the modular categories that arise in this way from unipotent groups are precisely those in the class $\mathfrak{C }_p^{\pm }$ .     

Normality and smoothness of simple linear group compactifications

Given a semisimple algebraic group $G$ , we characterize the normality and the smoothness of its simple linear compactifications, namely those equivariant $G\times G$ -compactifications possessing a unique closed orbit which arise in a projective space of the shape $\mathbb{P }(\mathrm{End}(V))$ , where $V$ is a finite dimensional rational $G$ -module. Both the characterizations are purely combinatorial and are expressed in terms of the highest weights of $V$ . In particular, we show that ${\mathrm{Sp}}(2r)$ (with $r \geqslant 1$ ) is the unique non-adjoint simple group which admits a simple smooth compactification.     

Growth estimates for orbits of self-adjoint groups

Let $G$ denote a closed, connected, self-adjoint, noncompact subgroup of $GL(n,\mathbb R )$ , and let $d_{R}$ and $d_{L}$ denote respectively the right and left invariant Riemannian metrics defined by the canonical inner product on $M(n,\mathbb R ) = T_{I} GL(n,\mathbb R )$ . Let $v$ be a nonzero vector of $\mathbb R ^{n}$ such that the orbit $G(v)$ is unbounded in $\mathbb R ^{n}$ . Then the function $g \rightarrow d_{R}(g, G_{v})$ is unbounded, where $G_{v} = \{g \in G : g(v) = v \}$ , and we obtain algebraically defined upper and lower bounds $\lambda ^{+}(v)$ and $\lambda ^{-}(v)$ for the asymptotic behavior of the function $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{R}(g, G_{v})}$ as $d_{R}(g, G_{v}) \rightarrow \infty $ . The upper bound $\lambda ^{+}(v)$ is at most 1. The orbit $G(v)$ is closed in $\mathbb R ^{n} \Leftrightarrow \lambda ^{-}(w)$ is positive for some w $\in G(v)$ . If $G_{v}$ is compact, then $g \rightarrow |d_{R}(g,I) - d_{L}(g,I)|$ is uniformly bounded in $G$ , and the exponents $\lambda ^{+}(v)$ and $\lambda ^{-}(v)$ are sharp upper and lower asymptotic bounds for the functions $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{R}(g,I)}$ and $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{L}(g,I)}$ as $d_{R}(g,I) \rightarrow \infty $ or as $d_{L}(g,I) \rightarrow \infty $ . However, we show by example that if $G_{v}$ is noncompact, then there need not exist asymptotic upper and lower bounds for the function $\frac{log|g(v)|}{d_{L}(g, G_{v})}$ as $d_{L}(g, G_{v}) \rightarrow \infty $ . The results apply to representations of noncompact semisimple Lie groups $G$ on finite dimensional real vector spaces. We compute $\lambda ^{+}$ and $\lambda ^{-}$ for the irreducible, real representations of $SL(2,\mathbb R )$ , and we show that if the dimension of the $SL(2,\mathbb R )$ -module $V$ is odd, then $\lambda ^{+} = \lambda ^{-}$ on a nonempty open subset of $V$ . We show that the function $\lambda ^{-}$ is $K$ -invariant, where $K = O(n,\mathbb R ) \cap G$ . We do not know if $\lambda ^{-}$ is $G$ -invariant.     

Wild quotient singularities of surfaces

Let $(B,\mathcal{M }_B)$ be a noetherian regular local ring of dimension $2$ with residue field $B/\mathcal{M }_B$ of characteristic $p>0$ . Assume that $B$ is endowed with an action of a finite cyclic group $H$ whose order is divisible by $p$ . Associated with a resolution of singularities of $\mathrm{Spec}B^H$ is a resolution graph $G$ and an intersection matrix $N$ . We prove in this article three structural properties of wild quotient singularities, which suggest that in general, one should expect when $H= \mathbb{Z }/p\mathbb{Z }$ that the graph $G$ is a tree, that the Smith group $\mathbb{Z }^n/\mathrm{Im}(N)$ is killed by $p$ , and that the fundamental cycle $Z$ has self-intersection $|Z^2|\le p$ . We undertake a combinatorial study of intersection matrices $N$ with a view towards the explicit determination of the invariants $\mathbb{Z }^n/\mathrm{Im}(N)$ and $Z$ . We also exhibit explicitly the resolution graphs of an infinite set of wild $\mathbb{Z }/2\mathbb{Z }$ -singularities, using some results on elliptic curves with potentially good ordinary reduction which could be of independent interest.     

A new graph parameter related to bounded rank positive semidefinite matrix completions

The Gram dimension $\mathrm{gd}(G)$ of a graph $G$ is the smallest integer $k\ge 1$ such that any partial real symmetric matrix, whose entries are specified on the diagonal and at the off-diagonal positions corresponding to edges of $G$ , can be completed to a positive semidefinite matrix of rank at most $k$ (assuming a positive semidefinite completion exists). For any fixed $k$ the class of graphs satisfying $\mathrm{gd}(G) \le k$ is minor closed, hence it can be characterized by a finite list of forbidden minors. We show that the only minimal forbidden minor is $K_{k+1}$ for $k\le 3$ and that there are two minimal forbidden minors: $K_5$ and $K_{2,2,2}$ for $k=4$ . We also show some close connections to Euclidean realizations of graphs and to the graph parameter $\nu ^=(G)$ of van der Holst (Combinatorica 23(4):633–651, 2003). In particular, our characterization of the graphs with $\mathrm{gd}(G)\le 4$ implies the forbidden minor characterization of the 3-realizable graphs of Belk (Discret Comput Geom 37:139–162, 2007) and Belk and Connelly (Discret Comput Geom 37:125–137, 2007) and of the graphs with $\nu ^=(G) \le 4$ of van der Holst (Combinatorica 23(4):633–651, 2003).     

Noncommutative Artin motives

In this article, we introduce the category of noncommutative Artin motives as well as the category of noncommutative mixed Artin motives. In the pure world, we start by proving that the classical category ${{\mathrm{AM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ of Artin motives (over a base field k) can be characterized as the largest category inside Chow motives which fully embeds into noncommutative Chow motives. Making use of a refined bridge between pure motives and noncommutative pure motives, we then show that the image of this full embedding, which we call the category ${{\mathrm{NAM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ of noncommutative Artin motives, is invariant under the different equivalence relations and modification of the symmetry isomorphism constraints. As an application, we recover the absolute Galois group $\mathrm{Gal}(\overline{k}/k)$ from the Tannakian formalism applied to ${{\mathrm{NAM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ . Then, we develop the base-change formalism in the world of noncommutative pure motives. As an application, we obtain new tools for the study of motivic decompositions and Schur/Kimura finiteness. Making use of this theory of base-change, we then construct a short exact sequence relating $\mathrm{Gal}(\overline{k}/k)$ with the noncommutative motivic Galois groups of k and $\overline{k}$ . Finally, we describe a precise relationship between this short exact sequence and the one constructed by Deligne–Milne. In the mixed world, we introduce the triangulated category ${{\mathrm{NMAM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ of noncommutative mixed Artin motives and construct a faithful functor from the classical category ${{\mathrm{MAM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ of mixed Artin motives to it. When k is a finite field, this functor is an equivalence. On the other hand, when k is of characteristic zero ${{\mathrm{NMAM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ is much richer than ${{\mathrm{MAM}}}(k)_\mathbb Q $ since its higher Ext-groups encode all the (rationalized) higher algebraic $K$ -theory of finite étale k-schemes. In the appendix, we establish a general result about short exact sequences of Galois groups which is of independent interest. As an application, we obtain a new proof of Deligne–Milne’s short exact sequence.     

Categories of bounded \left( {\mathfrak{sp}\left( {{{\mathrm{S}}^2}V \oplus {{\mathrm{S}}^2}{V^{*}}} \right),\;\mathfrak{gl}(V)} \right) - and \left( {\mathfrak{sp}\left( {{\varLambda^2}V \oplus {\varLambda^2}{V^{*}}} \right),\;\mathfrak{gl}(V)} \right) -modules

Let $ \mathfrak{g} $ be a reductive Lie algebra over $ \mathbb{C} $ and $ \mathfrak{k} \subset \mathfrak{g} $ be a reductive in $ \mathfrak{g} $ subalgebra. We call a $ \mathfrak{g} $ -module M a $ \left( {\mathfrak{g}{\hbox{,}}\;\mathfrak{k}} \right) $ -module whenever M is a direct sum of finite-dimensional $ \mathfrak{k} $ -modules. We call a $ \left( {\mathfrak{g}{\hbox{,}}\;\mathfrak{k}} \right) $ -module M bounded if there exists $ {C_M} \in {\mathbb{Z}_{{ \geqslant 0}}} $ such that for any simple finite-dimensional $ \mathfrak{k} $ -module E the dimension of the E-isotypic component is not greater than C _M dim E. Bounded $ \left( {\mathfrak{g}{\hbox{,}}\;\mathfrak{k}} \right) $ -modules form a subcategory of the category of $ \mathfrak{g} $ -modules. Let V be a finite-dimensional vector space. We prove that the categories of bounded $ \left( {\mathfrak{sp}\left( {{{\mathrm{S}}^2}V \oplus {{\mathrm{S}}^2}{V^{*}}} \right),\;\mathfrak{gl}(V)} \right) $ - and $ \left( {\mathfrak{sp}\left( {{\varLambda^2}V \oplus {\varLambda^2}{V^{*}}} \right),\;\mathfrak{gl}(V)} \right) $ -modules are isomorphic to the direct sum of countably many copies of the category of representations of some explicitly described quiver with relations under some mild assumptions on the dimension of V .     

On the Topology of Kac–Moody groups

We study the topology of spaces related to Kac–Moody groups. Given a Kac–Moody group over $\mathbb C $ , let $\text {K}$ denote the unitary form with maximal torus ${{\mathrm{T}}}$ having normalizer ${{\mathrm{N}}}({{\mathrm{T}}})$ . In this article we study the cohomology of the flag manifold $\text {K}/{{{\mathrm{T}}}}$ as a module over the Nil-Hecke algebra, as well as the (co)homology of $\text {K}$ as a Hopf algebra. In particular, if $\mathbb F $ has positive characteristic, we show that $\text {H}_*(\text {K},\mathbb F )$ is a finitely generated algebra, and that $\text {H}^*(\text {K},\mathbb F )$ is finitely generated only if $\text {K}$ is a compact Lie group . We also study the stable homotopy type of the classifying space $\text {BK}$ and show that it is a retract of the classifying space $\text {BN(T)}$ of ${{\mathrm{N}}}({{\mathrm{T}}})$ . We illustrate our results with the example of rank two Kac–Moody groups.     

A zoo of diffeomorphism groups on \mathbb{R }^{n}

We consider the groups ${\mathrm{Diff }}_\mathcal{B }(\mathbb{R }^n)$ , ${\mathrm{Diff }}_{H^\infty }(\mathbb{R }^n)$ , and ${\mathrm{Diff }}_{\mathcal{S }}(\mathbb{R }^n)$ of smooth diffeomorphisms on $\mathbb{R }^n$ which differ from the identity by a function which is in either $\mathcal{B }$ (bounded in all derivatives), $H^\infty = \bigcap _{k\ge 0}H^k$ , or $\mathcal{S }$ (rapidly decreasing). We show that all these groups are smooth regular Lie groups.     

Lower bounds on Ricci curvature and quantitative behavior of singular sets

Let Y ⁿ denote the Gromov-Hausdorff limit $M^{n}_{i}\stackrel{d_{\mathrm{GH}}}{\longrightarrow} Y^{n}$ of v-noncollapsed Riemannian manifolds with ${\mathrm{Ric}}_{M^{n}_{i}}\geq-(n-1)$ . The singular set $\mathcal {S}\subset Y$ has a stratification $\mathcal {S}^{0}\subset \mathcal {S}^{1}\subset\cdots\subset \mathcal {S}$ , where $y\in \mathcal {S}^{k}$ if no tangent cone at y splits off a factor ? ^k+1 isometrically. Here, we define for all η>0, 0<r≤1, the k-th effective singular stratum $\mathcal {S}^{k}_{\eta,r}$ satisfying $\bigcup_{\eta}\bigcap_{r} \,\mathcal {S}^{k}_{\eta,r}= \mathcal {S}^{k}$ . Sharpening the known Hausdorff dimension bound $\dim\, \mathcal {S}^{k}\leq k$ , we prove that for all y, the volume of the r-tubular neighborhood of $\mathcal {S}^{k}_{\eta,r}$ satisfies ${\mathrm {Vol}}(T_{r}(\mathcal {S}^{k}_{\eta,r})\cap B_{\frac{1}{2}}(y))\leq c(n,{\mathrm {v}},\eta)r^{n-k-\eta}$ . The proof involves a quantitative differentiation argument. This result has applications to Einstein manifolds. Let $\mathcal {B}_{r}$ denote the set of points at which the C ²-harmonic radius is ≤r. If also the $M^{n}_{i}$ are Kähler-Einstein with L ₂ curvature bound, $\| Rm\|_{L_{2}}\leq C$ , then ${\mathrm {Vol}}( \mathcal {B}_{r}\cap B_{\frac{1}{2}}(y))\leq c(n,{\mathrm {v}},C)r^{4}$ for all y. In the Kähler-Einstein case, without assuming any integral curvature bound on the $M^{n}_{i}$ , we obtain a slightly weaker volume bound on $\mathcal {B}_{r}$ which yields an a priori L _p curvature bound for all p<2. The methodology developed in this paper is new and is applicable in many other contexts. These include harmonic maps, minimal hypersurfaces, mean curvature flow and critical sets of solutions to elliptic equations.     

p-Groups with few conjugacy classes of normalizers

For a group $G$ , denote by $\omega (G)$ the number of conjugacy classes of normalizers of subgroups of $G$ . Clearly, $\omega (G)=1$ if and only if $G$ is a Dedekind group. Hence if $G$ is a 2-group, then $G$ is nilpotent of class $\le 2$ and if $G$ is a $p$ -group, $p>2$ , then $G$ is abelian. We prove a generalization of this. Let $G$ be a finite $p$ -group with $\omega (G)\le p+1$ . If $p=2$ , then $G$ is of class $\le 3$ ; if $p>2$ , then $G$ is of class $\le 2$ .     

Hyper-(rank one) groups

A group $G$ is called a $\mathcal{P }_1$ -group if it has a normal series of finite length whose factors have rank $1$ , while $G$ is an $\mathcal{H }_1$ -group if it has an ascending normal series of the same type. This paper investigates properties of $\mathcal{P }_1$ -groups and $\mathcal{H }_1$ -groups which correspond to known properties of nilpotent and supersoluble groups.     

Parabolic contractions of semisimple Lie algebras and their invariants

Let $G$ be a connected semisimple algebraic group with Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g }$ and $P$ a parabolic subgroup of $G$ with $\mathrm{Lie\, }P=\mathfrak{p }$ . The parabolic contraction $\mathfrak{q }$ of $\mathfrak{g }$ is the semi-direct product of $\mathfrak{p }$ and a $\mathfrak{p }$ -module $\mathfrak{g }/\mathfrak{p }$ regarded as an abelian ideal. We are interested in the polynomial invariants of the adjoint and coadjoint representations of $\mathfrak{q }$ . In the adjoint case, the algebra of invariants is easily described and it turns out to be a graded polynomial algebra. The coadjoint case is more complicated. Here we found a connection between symmetric invariants of $\mathfrak{q }$ and symmetric invariants of centralisers $\mathfrak{g }_e\subset \mathfrak{g }$ , where $e\in \mathfrak{g }$ is a Richardson element with polarisation $\mathfrak{p }$ . Using this connection and results of Panyushev et al. (J Algebra 313:343–391, 2007), we prove that the algebra of symmetric invariants of $\mathfrak{q }$ is free for all parabolic subalgebras in types $\mathbf A$ and $\mathbf C$ and some parabolics in type $\mathbf B$ . This technique also applies to the minimal parabolic subalgebras in all types. For $\mathfrak{p }=\mathfrak{b }$ , a Borel subalgebra of $\mathfrak{g }$ , one gets a contraction of $\mathfrak{g }$ recently introduced by Feigin (Selecta Math 18:513–537, 2012) and studied from invariant-theoretic point of view in our previous paper (Panyushev and Yakimova in Ann Inst Fourier 62(6):2053–2068, 2012).     

A Construction of Generalized Harish-Chandra Modules for Locally Reductive Lie Algebras

We study cohomological induction for a pair $ {\left( {\mathfrak{g},\mathfrak{k}} \right)} $ , $ \mathfrak{g} $ being an infinitedimensional locally reductive Lie algebra and $ \mathfrak{k} \subset \mathfrak{g} $ being of the form $ \mathfrak{k}_{0} \subset C_{\mathfrak{g}} {\left( {\mathfrak{k}_{0} } \right)} $ , where $ \mathfrak{k}_{0} \subset \mathfrak{g} $ is a finite-dimensional reductive in $ \mathfrak{g} $ subalgebra and $ C_{\mathfrak{g}} {\left( {\mathfrak{k}_{0} } \right)} $ is the centralizer of $ \mathfrak{k}_{0} $ in $ \mathfrak{g} $ . We prove a general nonvanishing and $ \mathfrak{k} $ -finiteness theorem for the output. This yields, in particular, simple $ {\left( {\mathfrak{g},\mathfrak{k}} \right)} $ -modules of finite type over k which are analogs of the fundamental series of generalized Harish-Chandra modules constructed in [PZ1] and [PZ2]. We study explicit versions of the construction when $ \mathfrak{g} $ is a root-reductive or diagonal locally simple Lie algebra.