Donovan’s conjecture,crossed products and algebraic group actions

Donovan’s conjecture, on blocks of finite group algebras over an algebraically closed field of prime characteristicp, asserts that for any finitep-groupD, there are only finitely many Morita equivalence classes of blocks with defect groupD. The main result of this paper is a reduction theorem: It suffices to prove the conjecture for groups generated by conjugates ofD. A number of other finiteness results are proved along the way. The main tool is a result on actions of algebraic groups.