Supercharacters and superclasses for algebra groups

We study certain sums of irreducible characters and compatible unions of conjugacy classes in finite algebra groups. These groups generalize the unimodular upper triangular groups over a finite field, and the supercharacter theory we develop extends results of Carlos André and Ning Yan that were originally proved in the upper triangular case. This theory sometimes allows explicit computations in situations where it would be impractical to work with the full character table. We discuss connections with the Kirillov orbit method and with Gelfand pairs, and we give conditions for a supercharacter or a superclass to be an ordinary irreducible character or conjugacy class, respectively. We also show that products of supercharacters are positive integer combinations of supercharacters.