An analog of nilpotence arising from supercharacter theory

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to generalize several group theoretic concepts such as the center and commutator subgroup, central series, and ultimately nilpotence to a supercharacter theoretic setting, and to use these concepts to show that there can be a strong connection between the structure of a group and the structure of its supercharacter theories. We then use these concepts to show that the upper and lower annihilator series of $J$ can be described in terms of certain central series for the algebra group $G=1+J$ defined by $\mathsf{S}$, when $\mathsf{S}$ is the algebra group supercharacter theory defined by Diaconis--Isaacs.