Strongly generating elements in finite and profinite groups

This meeting was focused on asymptotic aspects of group theory. The resulting problems lead, in particular, to the study of infinite groups, with an emphasis on the asymptotic behaviour of their finite quotients. Also, properties of infinite families of finite groups are at the center of interest in the field. We had talks on the most important recent developments in the field of asymptotic and profinite group theory. We single out some of these new results. The classification of finite simple groups has provided an impetus for the detailed investigation of properties of families of groups of Lie type and of alternating groups. This has produced many results of asymptotic or probabilistic nature, describing in a quantitative way properties that hold for all sufficiently large simple groups, or else that hold ‘almost surely’ as the orders of the groups are tending to infinity. Here we had a talk of Aner Shalev on his recent solution (with coauthors) of Ore's conjecture. Recently there has been much activity in the study of infinite groups, with an emphasis on the asymptotic behaviour of their finite quotients, or their finite-index subgroups. The theory of subgroup growth is now well established; the theory of the associated zeta functions is making good progress. More subtle variations of subgroup growth are also developing into significant theories in their own right: there are important new results on representation growth – of arithmetic groups, nilpotent groups and pro-p groups; and on maximal subgroup growth, with applications to probabilistic generation properties. Profinite groups are ‘asymptotic limits’ of finite groups. The nature of verbal subgroups and verbal mappings, in both finite and profinite groups, has been the focus of much recent work. This has led among other things to the solution of Serre's problem on subgroups of finite index in finitely generated profinite groups; other significant results include the characterisation of closed verbal subgroups in pro-p groups and new characterisations of solubility in finite groups. Branch groups, both discrete and profinite, are certain groups of automorphisms of rooted trees; introduced by Grigorchuk and others over 20 years ago, they have provided the solution to several outstanding problems, and their study continues to provide new results. Some of them were reported on in our meeting. We also had talks from important fields of mathematics in which profinite and asymptotic group theory finds application. There is, for instance, the study of the absolute Galois group of the rationals and in particular its closed pro-p subgroups. Methods from pro-p group theory have successfully been applied in order to understand fundamental groups of (hyperbolic) 3-manifolds. The interplay between the topological fundamental group of a complex algebraic surface and its profinite completion which is the etale fundamental group of the surface is the subject of recent research. We believe that the meeting was exciting and successful. The high quality lectures covered a lot of very recent results in the field. There were many intense discussions between mathematicians of different fields. Altogether there were over 50 participants from all over the world. The percentage of young researchers was very high. The following extended abstracts were collected and edited by Dr. Evija Ribnere.

Expanders are highly connected sparse graphs of great interest in computer science, in areas ranging from parallel computation to complexity theory, from cryptography to coding theory, and, most recently, computational group theory (see e.g. [AKS, G+, LP, SS, V, WZ].) The explicit constructions of expander graphs [M1, M2, LPS] (see also [GG, Lu]) use deep mathematical tools to construct families of Cayley graphs of finite groups. The Independence Problem [LW], is whether being an expander family is a property of the groups alone, independent of the choice of generators. A counterexample to the general the problem was recently obtained in [ALW], by using a new combinatorial construction of expanders [RVW]. The problem remains for all classical series of finite simple groups (An, PSL(2,p), etc.)Let G be a finite group generated by at most d elements. The product replacement graph Γk(G) is defined to be a graph, with vertices corresponding to generating k-tuples in G, and edges corresponding to Nielsen transformations. Most recently, graphs Γk(G) became a subject of an intense investigation, prompted by the study of a commonly used 'practical' product replacement algorithm for generating random elements in finite groups, designed Leedham-Green and Soicher [LG]. This algorithm, based on the random walk on graphs Γk(G), showed a remarkable performance, as reported in [C+]. It was suggested in [LP], and proved in several special cases, that the product replacement graphs Γk(G) are expanders, for a fixed k, when |G| → ∞The main result of this paper is Theorem 2, establishing the connection between the expansion coefficient of the product replacement graph Γk(G) and the minimal expansion coefficient of a Cayley graph of group G with k generators. One can think of our result as of an additional evidence in favor of the speculation in [LP]. On the other hand, it gives an algorithmic motivation for study of the Independence Problem, in the aftermath of [ALW].In a special case (see Theorem 1 below), we show that if one assumes that all Cayley graphs with at most four generators in PSL (2, p) have a universal lower bound on expansion, then the product replacement graphs Γk(PSL(2,p)) form an expander family, when k ≥ 8 is fixed, and p → ∞.The proof of the Theorems consists of two parts: probability on groups and graph theoretic. The latter is based on a new combinatorial result of independent interest (Lemmas 4, 5), which generalizes a classical lemma that the direct product of expanders is an expander (see e.g. [Ch]). We prove that if a graph Γ on a direct product of sets satisfies two conditions:1) all 'row' subgraphs are expanders,2) at least (1-e) proportion of 'column' graphs are expanders,then graph &Gamma is also an expander. We use a novel combinatorial technique based on graph decomposition, as opposed to path arguments used in previously in [CG, DS2, DS3, P4]. It is easy to see that such a technique can never prove that a certain family of graphs is an expander family (cf. [P3]).

We survey recent results regarding embeddings of finite simple groups (and their nonsplit central extensions) in complex Lie groups, especially the Lie groups of exceptional type. Introduction Throughout this paper, L will be a finite group. Representation theory for L is usually understood to be the study of group morphisms L → GL(n, k) for distinguished collections of fields k (e.g., all overfields of a fixed field F ) and positive integers n . The topic of this survey is motivated by the question as to what happens if GL ( n ,·) is replaced by another algebraic group G (·). We shall mainly be concerned with the case where L is a finite simple group (that is, a finite nonabelian simple group) or a central extension thereof, and G(k) is a connected simple algebraic group over a field k . A further restriction of our discussion concerns the field k . It will mostly be taken to be the complex numbers, in which case we will mainly study group morphisms from L to the complex Lie group G (ℂ). (See below for some exceptions in §3 and §5.) For G (·) of classical type, the theory for representations L → G (ℂ) differs little from the usual one for GL ( n , ℂ). Indeed, a representation L → GL ( n , ℂ) decomposes into irreducible subrepresentations. The decomposition is well controlled by character theory.

We investigate the possible structures imposed on a finite group by its possession of an automorphism sending a large fraction of the group elements to their cubes, the philosophy being that this should force the group to be, in some sense, close to abelian. We prove two main theorems. In the first, we completely classify all finite groups with an automorphism cubing more than half their elements. All such groups are either nilpotent class 2 or possess an abelian subgroup of index 2. For our second theorem, we show that if a group possesses an automorphism sending more than 4/15 of its elements to their cubes, then it must be solvable. The group A_5 shows that this result is best-possible. Both our main findings closely parallel results of previous authors on finite groups possessing an automorphism which inverts many elements. The technicalities of the new proofs are somewhat more subtle, and also throw up a nice connection to a basic problem in combinatorial number theory, namely the study of subsets of finite cyclic groups which avoid non-trivial solutions to one or more translation invariant linear equations.

Let G be a finite 2-generated non-cyclic group. The spread of G is the largest integer k such that for any nontrivial elements x1,…,xk, there exists y G ∈ G such that G = 〈xi,y〉 for all i. The more restrictive notion of uniform spread, denoted u(G), requires y to be chosen from a fixed conjugacy class of G, and a theorem of Breuer, Guralnick and Kantor states that u(G) ⩾ 2 for every non-abelian finite simple group G. For any group with u(G) ⩾ 1, we define the uniform domination number γu(G) of G to be the minimal size of a subset S of conjugate elements such that for each nontrivial x ∈ G there exists y ∈ S with G = 〈x, y〉 (in this situation, we say that S is a uniform dominating set for G). We introduced the latter notion in a recent paper, where we used probabilistic methods to determine close to best possible bounds on γu(G) for all simple groups G.In this paper we establish several new results on the spread, uniform spread and uniform domination number of finite groups and finite simple groups. For example, we make substantial progress towards a classification of the simple groups G with γu (G) = 2, and we study the associated probability that two randomly chosen conjugate elements form a uniform dominating set for G. We also establish new results concerning the 2-generation of soluble and symmetric groups, and we present several open problems.

We show that, for any positive integer k, there are only finitely many finite groups, up to isomorphism, with exactly k conjugacy classes of elements of prime power order. This generalizes a result of E. Landau from 1903. The proof of our generalization makes use of the classification of finite simple groups.

Let G be a group and let x, y ∈ G. If every element of G can be written as a word $${x^{{\alpha _1}}}{y^{{\alpha _2}}}{x^{{\alpha _3}}} \ldots {x^{{\alpha _{n - 1}}}}{y^{{\alpha _n}}}$$ (1) where αi ∈ ℤ, 1 ≤ i ≤ n, then we say that x and y generate G and that G is a 2-generator group. Although cyclic groups are 2-generator groups according to this definition we are only interested here in 2-generator groups which cannot be generated by a single element. Even among finite groups G many are not 2-generator groups; for example the abelian group of order 8 in which every element has order 2 cannot be 2-generated since given any pair of distinct non-trivial elements x, y there are only 4 words given by expressions of the form (1). However, many groups are 2-generated, in particular finite simple groups.

Probability that the commutator of two group elements is equal to a given element

For a formation 𝔉 of finite groups, consider the graph whose vertices are elements of a finite group, with two vertices connected by an edge if and only if they generate a non-𝔉-group as elements of the group. A hereditary formation 𝔉 is said to be regular if the set of all isolated vertices of the described graph coincides with the intersection of all 𝔉-maximal subgroups in every group. In this paper, a constructive description of saturated regular formations of soluble groups is given, which improves the results of Lucchini and Nemmi. In particular, it is shown that saturated regular non-empty formations of soluble groups are just hereditary formations 𝔉 of soluble groups that contain every group whose cyclic primary subgroups are all 𝐾-𝔉-subnormal. Also, we prove that the lattice of saturated regular formations of soluble groups is lattice isomorphic to the Steinitz lattice.

Let K be a non-archimedean local field and U a compact subgroup of GLn(K). Such U is a profinite group, actually it is virtually pro-p. If char(K) = 0, then U is finitely generated and even finitely presented as a profinite group. On the other hand if char(K) = p > 0, then U need not be finitely generated. Moreover, even if U is finitely generated, it may be non-finitely presented (see(1.3)). On the other hand;

In this expanded account of a talk given at the Oberwolfach Arbeitsgemeinschaft Totally Disconnected Groups, October 2014, we discuss results of Nikolay Nikolov and Dan Segal on abstract quotients of compact Hausdorff topological paying special attention to the class of finitely generated profinite groups. Our primary source is a paper, entitled Generators and commutators in finite groups; abstract quotients of compact groups, that was published by Nikolov and Segal in 2012. Sidestepping all difficult and technical proofs, we present a selection of accessible arguments to illuminate key ideas in the subject.

Let G be a finite group. We let [Formula: see text] and σ (G) denote the number of maximal subgroups of G and the least positive integer n such that G is written as the union of n proper subgroups, respectively. In this paper, we determine the structure of G/ Φ (G) when G is a finite soluble group with [Formula: see text].

The classical Waring problem deals with expressing every natural number as a sum of g(k) kth powers. Similar problems for finite simple groups have been studied recently, and in this paper we study them for finite quasisimple groups G. We show that for a fixed non-trivial group word w and large enough G we have w(G)^3=G, namely every element of G is a product of 3 values of w. For various families of finite quasisimple groups, including covers of alternating groups, we obtain a stronger result, namely w(G)^2=G. However, in contrast with the case of simple groups, we show that w(G)^2 need not equal G for all large G. If k>2 then x^k y^k fails to be surjective for infinitely many finite quasisimple groups. The case k=2 turns out to be exceptional. Indeed, our last result shows that every element of a finite quasisimple group is a product of two squares. This can be regarded as a non-commutative analogue of Lagrange's four squares theorem.

A ‐tuple of core‐free subgroups of a finite group is said to be regular if has a regular orbit on the Cartesian product . The regularity number of , denoted by , is the smallest positive integer with the property that every such ‐tuple is regular. In this paper, we develop some general methods for studying the regularity of subgroup tuples in arbitrary finite groups, and we determine the precise regularity number of all almost simple groups with an alternating or sporadic socle. For example, we prove that and . We also formulate and investigate natural generalisations of several well‐studied problems on base sizes for finite permutation groups, including conjectures due to Cameron, Pyber and Vdovin. For instance, we extend earlier work of Burness, O'Brien and Wilson by proving that for every almost simple sporadic group, with equality if and only if is the Mathieu group . We also show that every triple of soluble subgroups in an almost simple sporadic group is regular, which generalises recent work of Burness on base sizes for transitive actions of sporadic groups with soluble point stabilisers.

FIELD AUTOMORPHISMS AND MAXIMAL SUBGROUPS OF FINITE CHEVALLEY GROUPS