arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Dennis D. Gulko.
We give examples of countable linear groups in $SL_{n}(R)$ for $n \ge 3$, with no nontrivial normal abelian subgroups, that admit a faithful sharply 2-transitive action on a set. Without the linearity assumption, such groups were recently constructed by Rips, Segev, and Tent. Our examples are of permutational characteristic $2$, in the sense that involutions do not fix a point in the $2$-transitive action.
A group G is sharply 2-transitive if it admits a faithful permutation representation that is transitive and free on pairs of distinct points. Conjecturally, for all such groups there exists a near-field N (i.e. a skew field that is distributive only from the left) such that G is isomorphic to the semidirect product of the multiplicative and additive groups of N. This is well known in the finite case. We prove this conjecture when G < GL(n,F) is a linear group. Here we have to assume that both the characteristic of the field F and the permutational characteristic of the group G (see Definition 2.1) are not equal to 2.