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 $|\mathrm{bcl}(G)|\ge p^{\frac{1}{p}}(|G:O_{p}(G)|_{p})^{\frac{p-1}{p}}$ .     

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 $G\cong \text{ PGL }(2, r)$ .     

Generalized normal homogeneous Riemannian metrics on spheres and projective spaces

In this paper, we develop new methods to study generalized normal homogeneous Riemannian manifolds. In particular, we obtain a complete classification of generalized normal homogeneous Riemannian metrics on spheres ${S^n}$ . We prove that for any connected (almost effective) transitive on $S^n$ compact Lie group $G$ , the family of $G$ -invariant Riemannian metrics on $S^n$ contains generalized normal homogeneous but not normal homogeneous metrics if and only if this family depends on more than one parameters and $n\ge 5$ . Any such family (that exists only for $n=2k+1$ ) contains a metric $g_\mathrm{can}$ of constant sectional curvature $1$ on $S^n$ . We also prove that $(S^{2k+1}, g_\mathrm{can})$ is Clifford–Wolf homogeneous, and therefore generalized normal homogeneous, with respect to $G$ (except the groups $G={ SU}(k+1)$ with odd $k+1$ ). The space of unit Killing vector fields on $(S^{2k+1}, g_\mathrm{can})$ from Lie algebra $\mathfrak g $ of Lie group $G$ is described as some symmetric space (except the case $G=U(k+1)$ when one obtains the union of all complex Grassmannians in $\mathbb{C }^{k+1}$ ).     

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.     

On locally finite groups with a four-subgroup whose centralizer is small

Let $G$ be a locally finite group which contains a non-cyclic subgroup $V$ of order four such that $C_{G}\left( V\right) $ is finite and $C_{G}\left( \phi \right)$ has finite exponent for some $\phi \in V$ . We show that $[G,\phi ]^{\prime }$ has finite exponent. This enables us to deduce that $G$ has a normal series $1\le G_1\le G_2\le G_3\le G$ such that $G_1$ and $G/G_2$ have finite exponents while $G_2/G_1$ is abelian. Moreover $G_3$ is hyperabelian and has finite index in $G$ .     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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 $\mathfrak{C }_p^{\pm }$ .     

On the bicanonical map of primitive varieties with q(X) = \mathrm{dim }X: the degree and the Euler number

Let $X$ be a variety of maximal Albanese dimension and of general type. Assume that $q(X) = \mathrm{dim }X$ , the Albanese variety $\mathrm {Alb} (X)$ is a simple abelian variety, and the bicanonical map is not birational. We prove that the Euler number $\chi (X, \omega _X)$ is equal to 1, and $|2K_X|$ separates two distinct points over the same general point on $\mathrm {Alb} (X)$ via $\mathrm {alb}_X$ (Theorem 1.1).     

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.     

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 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.     

Sharpening the Norm Bound in the Subspace Perturbation Theory

Let $A$ be a (possibly unbounded) self-adjoint operator on a separable Hilbert space $\mathfrak H .$ Assume that $\sigma $ is an isolated component of the spectrum of $A$ , that is, $\mathrm{dist}(\sigma ,\Sigma )=d>0$ where $\Sigma =\mathrm spec (A)\setminus \sigma .$ Suppose that $V$ is a bounded self-adjoint operator on $\mathfrak H $ such that $\Vert V\Vert <d/2$ and let $L=A+V$ , $\mathrm{Dom }(L)=\mathrm{Dom }(A).$ Denote by $P$ the spectral projection of $A$ associated with the spectral set $\sigma $ and let $Q$ be the spectral projection of $L$ corresponding to the closed $\Vert V\Vert $ -neighborhood of $\sigma .$ Introducing the sequence $$\begin{aligned} \varkappa _n=\frac{1}{2}\left(1-\frac{(\pi ^2-4)^n}{(\pi ^2+4)^n}\right), \quad n\in \{0\}\cup {\mathbb N }, \end{aligned}$$ we prove that the following bound holds: $$\begin{aligned} \arcsin (\Vert P-Q\Vert )\le M_\star \left(\frac{\Vert V\Vert }{d}\right), \end{aligned}$$ where the estimating function $M_\star (x)$ , $x\in \bigl [0,\frac{1}{2}\bigr )$ , is given by $$\begin{aligned} M_\star (x)=\frac{1}{2}\,\,n_{_\#}(x)\,\arcsin \left(\frac{4\pi }{\pi ^2+4}\right) +\frac{1}{2}\,\arcsin \left(\frac{\pi ( x-\varkappa _{n_{_\#}(x)})}{1-2\varkappa _{n_{_\#}(x)})}\right), \end{aligned}$$ with $n_{_\#}(x)=\max \left\{ n\,\bigr |\,\,n\in \{0\}\cup {\mathbb N }\,, \varkappa _n\le x\right\} $ . The bound obtained is essentially stronger than the previously known estimates for $\Vert P-Q\Vert .$ Furthermore, this bound ensures that $\Vert P-Q\Vert <1$ and, thus, that the spectral subspaces $\mathrm{Ran }(P)$ and $\mathrm{Ran }(Q)$ are in the acute-angle case whenever $\Vert V\Vert <c_\star \,d$ , where $$\begin{aligned} c_\star =16\,\,\frac{\pi ^6-2\pi ^4+32\pi ^2-32}{(\pi ^2+4)^4}=0.454169\ldots . \end{aligned}$$ Our proof of the above results is based on using the triangle inequality for the maximal angle between subspaces and on employing the a priori generic $\sin 2\theta $ estimate for the variation of a spectral subspace. As an example, the boundedly perturbed quantum harmonic oscillator is discussed.     

Finite groups all of whose second maximal subgroups are {\mathcal{H }}_p-groups

Let $G$ be a finite group. A subgroup $H$ of $G$ is called an $\mathcal{H }$ -subgroup of $G$ if $N_G(H)\cap H^g\le H$ for all $g\in G$ . A group $G$ is said to be an ${\mathcal{H }}_p$ -group if every cyclic subgroup of $G$ of prime order or order 4 is an $\mathcal{H }$ -subgroup of $G$ . In this paper, the structure of a finite group all of whose second maximal subgroups are ${\mathcal{H }}_p$ -subgroups has been characterized.     

Chromatic Gallai identities operating on Lovász number

If $G$ is a triangle-free graph, then two Gallai identities can be written as $\alpha (G)+\overline{\chi }(L(G))=|V(G)|=\alpha (L(G))+\overline{\chi }(G)$ , where $\alpha $ and $\overline{\chi }$ denote the stability number and the clique-partition number, and $L(G)$ is the line graph of  $G$ . We show that, surprisingly, both equalities can be preserved for any graph $G$ by deleting the edges of the line graph corresponding to simplicial pairs of adjacent arcs, according to any acyclic orientation of  $G$ . As a consequence, one obtains an operator $\Phi $ which associates to any graph parameter $\beta $ such that $\alpha (G) \le \beta (G) \le \overline{\chi }(G)$ for all graph $G$ , a graph parameter $\Phi _\beta $ such that $\alpha (G) \le \Phi _\beta (G) \le \overline{\chi }(G)$ for all graph $G$ . We prove that $\vartheta (G) \le \Phi _\vartheta (G)$ and that $\Phi _{\overline{\chi }_f}(G)\le \overline{\chi }_f(G)$ for all graph  $G$ , where $\vartheta $ is Lovász theta function and $\overline{\chi }_f$ is the fractional clique-partition number. Moreover, $\overline{\chi }_f(G) \le \Phi _\vartheta (G)$ for triangle-free $G$ . Comparing to the previous strengthenings $\Psi _\vartheta $ and $\vartheta ^{+ \triangle }$ of $\vartheta $ , numerical experiments show that $\Phi _\vartheta $ is a significant better lower bound for $\overline{\chi }$ than $\vartheta $ .     

On the signed star domination number of regular multigraphs

Let $G$ be a graph with the vertex set $V(G)$ and the edge set $E(G)$ . A function $f: E(G)\longrightarrow \{-1, 1\}$ is said to be a signed star dominating function of $G$ if $\sum _{e \in E_G(v)}f (e)\ge 1 $ , for every $v \in V(G)$ , where $E_G(v) = \{uv\in E(G)\,|\,u \in V (G)\}$ . The minimum values of $\sum _{e \in E_G(v)}f (e)$ , taken over all signed star dominating functions $f$ on $G$ , is called the signed star domination number of $G$ and denoted by $\gamma _{SS}(G)$ . In this paper we determine the signed star domination number of regular multigraphs.     

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 $\le 2$ .