arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Pham Huu Tiep.
Given a faithful finite-dimensional representation $V$ of a finite group $G$ over any field $\mathbb{F}$, we show that any irreducible ${\mathbb{F}}G$-module $W$ appears, as a submodule or a quotient, in $\mathrm{Sym}^m(V)$ for some integer $1 \leq m \leq |G|$ (that may depend on $W$).
Motivated by the study of an Hecke action on iterated Shimura integrals undertaken in [H], in this appendix to [H] we prove that, for any prime $p \geq 5$ and for any integer $n \geq 1$, every complex irreducible representation of $G=\mathrm{SL}_2(\mathbb{Z}/p^n \mathbb{Z})$ that are trivial on $\mathbf{Z}(G)$ appears as an irreducible constituent of the conjugation representation of $G$.
We develop a theory of levels for irreducible representations of symmetric groups of degree $n$ analogous to the theory of levels for finite classical groups. A key property of level is that the level of a character, provided it is not too big compared to $n$, gives a good lower bound on its degree, and, moreover, every character of low degree is either itself of low level or becomes so after tensoring with the sign character. Furthermore, if $l_1$ and $l_2$ satisfy a linear upper bound in $n$, then the maximal level of composition factors of the tensor product of representations of levels $l_1$ and $l_2$ is $l_1+l_2$. To prove all of this in positive characteristic, we develop the notion of rank, which is an analogue of the notion of rank of cross-characteristic representations of finite classical groups. We show, using modular branching rules and degenerate affine Hecke algebras, that the level and the rank agree, as long as the level is not too large. We exploit Schur-Weyl duality, modular Littlewood-Richardson coefficients and tilting modules to prove a modular analogue of the Murnaghan-Littlewood theorem on Kronecker products for symmetric groups. As an application, we obtain representation growth results for both ordinary and modular representations of symmetric and alternating groups analogous to those for finite groups of Lie type.
The paper studies the minimum polynomial degrees of $p$-elements in cross-characteristic representations of simple groups of exceptional Lie type whose BN-pair rank is at most 2. Specifically, we prove that the degree in question equals the order of the element.
The deep theory of approximate subgroups establishes 3-step product growth for subsets of finite simple groups $G$ of Lie type of bounded rank. In this paper we obtain 2-step growth results for representations of such groups $G$ (including those of unbounded rank), where products of subsets are replaced by tensor products of representations. Let $G$ be a finite simple group of Lie type and $χ$ a character of $G$. Let $|χ|$ denote the sum of the squares of the degrees of all (distinct) irreducible characters of $G$ which are constituents of $χ$. We show that for all $δ>0$ there exists $ε>0$, independent of $G$, such that if $χ$ is an irreducible character of $G$ satisfying $|χ| \le |G|^{1-δ}$, then $|χ^2| \ge |χ|^{1+ε}$. We also obtain results for reducible characters, and establish faster growth in the case where $|χ| \le |G|^δ$. In another direction, we explore covering phenomena, namely situations where every irreducible character of $G$ occurs as a constituent of certain products of characters. For example, we prove that if $|χ_1| \cdots |χ_m|$ is a high enough power of $|G|$, then every irreducible character of $G$ appears in $χ_1\cdotsχ_m$. Finally, we obtain growth results for compact semisimple Lie groups.
Let k(B_0) and l(B_0) respectively denote the number of ordinary and p-Brauer irreducible characters in the principal block B_0 of a finite group G. We prove that, if k(B_0)-l(B_0)=1, then l(B_0)\geq p-1 or else p=11 and l(B_0)=9. This follows from a more general result that for every finite group G in which all non-trivial p-elements are conjugate, l(B_0)\geq p-1 or else p = 11 and G/O_{p'}(G) =11^2:SL(2,5). These results are useful in the study of principal blocks with a few characters. We propose that, in every finite group G of order divisible by p, the number of irreducible Brauer characters in the principal p-block of G is always at least 2\sqrt{p-1}+1-k_p(G), where k_p(G) is the number of conjugacy classes of p-elements of G. This indeed is a consequence of the celebrated Alperin weight conjecture and known results on bounding the number of p-regular classes in finite groups.
We show that, if $w_1, \ldots , w_6$ are words which are not an identity of any (non-abelian) finite simple group, then $w_1(G)w_2(G) \cdots w_6(G) = G$ for all (non-abelian) finite simple groups $G$. In particular, for every word $w$, either $w(G)^6 = G$ for all finite simple groups, or $w(G)=1$ for some finite simple groups. These theorems follow from more general results we obtain on characteristic collections of finite groups and their covering numbers, which are of independent interest and have additional applications.
We use hypergeometric sheaves on $G_m/F_q$, which are particular sorts of rigid local systems, to construct explicit local systems whose arithmetic and geometric monodromy groups are the finite general linear groups $GL_n(q)$ for any $n \ge 2$ and and any prime power $q$, so long as $q > 3$ when $n=2$. This paper continues a program of finding simple (in the sense of simple to remember) families of exponential sums whose monodromy groups are certain finite groups of Lie type, cf. [Gr], [KT1], [KT2], [KT3] for (certain) finite symplectic and unitary groups, or certain sporadic groups, cf. [KRL], [KRLT1], [KRLT2], [KRLT3]. The novelty of this paper is obtaining $GL_n(q)$ in this hypergeometric way. A pullback construction then yields local systems on $A^1/F_q$ whose geometric monodromy groups are $SL_n(q)$. These turn out to recover a construction of Abhyankar.
Let $G$ be a finite group, and $α$ a nontrivial character of $G$. The McKay graph $\mathcal{M}(G,α)$ has the irreducible characters of $G$ as vertices, with an edge from $χ_1$ to $χ_2$ if $χ_2$ is a constituent of $αχ_1$. We study the diameters of McKay graphs for finite simple groups $G$. For alternating groups, we prove a conjecture made in [LST]: there is an absolute constant $C$ such that $\hbox{diam}\,{\mathcal M}(G,α) \le C\frac{\log |\mathsf{A}_n|}{\log α(1)}$ for all nontrivial irreducible characters $α$ of $\mathsf{A}_n$. Also for classsical groups of symplectic or orthogonal type of rank $r$, we establish a linear upper bound $Cr$ on the diameters of all nontrivial McKay graphs.
In recent years there has been significant progress in the study of products of subsets of finite groups and of finite simple groups in particular. In this paper we consider which families of finite simple groups $G$ have the property that for each $ε> 0$ there exists $N > 0$ such that, if $|G| \ge N$ and $S, T$ are normal subsets of $G$ with at least $ε|G|$ elements each, then every non-trivial element of $G$ is the product of an element of $S$ and an element of $T$. We show that this holds in a strong sense for finite simple groups of Lie type of bounded rank, while it does not hold for alternating groups or groups of the form ${\mathrm{PSL}}_n(q)$ where $q$ is fixed and $n$ tends to infinity. Our second main result is that any element in a transitive permutation representation of a sufficiently large finite simple group is a product of two derangements.
A certain "condition (S)" on reductive algebraic groups was introduced in [GT2], in which a slightly stronger condition (S+) was shown to have very strong consequences. We show that a wide class of Kloosterman and hypergeometric sheaves satisfy (S+). For this class of sheaves, we determine possible structure of their monodromy groups.
We construct explicit local systems on the affine line in characteristic $p>2$, whose geometric monodromy groups are the finite symplectic groups $Sp_{2n}(q)$ for all $n \ge 2$, and others whose geometric monodromy groups are the special unitary groups $SU_n(q)$ for all odd $n \ge 3$, and $q$ any power of $p$, in their total Weil representations. One principal merit of these local systems is that their associated trace functions are one-parameter families of exponential sums of a very simple, i.e., easy to remember, form. We also exhibit hypergeometric sheaves on $G_m$, whose geometric monodromy groups are the finite symplectic groups $Sp_{2n}(q)$ for any $n \ge 2$, and others whose geometric monodromy groups are the finite general unitary groups $GU_n(q)$ for any odd $n \geq 3$.
We investigate bounds on the dimension of cohomology groups for finite groups acting on an irreducible kG-module for G a finite group of bound sectional p-rank and k an algebraically closed field of characteristic p.
Building on reduction theorems and dimension bounds for symmetric groups obtained in our earlier work, we classify the irreducible restrictions of representations of the symmetric and alternating groups to proper subgroups. Such classification is known when the characteristic of the ground field is greater than $3$, but the small characteristics cases require a substantially more delicate analysis and new ideas. Our results fit into the Aschbacher-Scott program on maximal subgroups of finite classical groups.
Let $G$ be a finite group, and $α$ a nontrivial character of $G$. The McKay graph ${\mathcal M}(G,α)$ has the irreducible characters of $G$ as vertices, with an edge from $χ_1$ to $χ_2$ if $χ_2$ is a constituent of $αχ_1$. We study the diameters of McKay graphs for simple groups $G$. For $G$ a group of Lie type, we show that for any $α$, the diameter is bounded by a quadratic function of the rank, and obtain much stronger bounds for $G={\rm PSL}_n(q)$ or ${\rm PSU}_n(q)$. We also bound the diameter for symmetric and alternating groups.
The probabilistic Waring problem for finite simple groups asks whether every word of the form $w_1w_2$, where $w_1$ and $w_2$ are non-trivial words in disjoint sets of variables, induces almost uniform distribution on finite simple groups with respect to the $L^1$ norm. Our first main result provides a positive solution to this problem. We also provide a geometric characterization of words inducing almost uniform distribution on finite simple groups of Lie type of bounded rank, and study related random walks. Our second main result concerns the probabilistic $L^{\infty}$ Waring problem for finite simple groups. We show that for every $l \ge 1$ there exists $N = N(l)$, such that if $w_1, \ldots , w_N$ are non-trivial words of length at most $l$ in pairwise disjoint sets of variables, then their product $w_1 \cdots w_N$ is almost uniform on finite simple groups with respect to the $L^{\infty}$ norm. The dependence of $N$ on $l$ is genuine. This result implies that, for every word $w = w_1 \cdots w_N$ as above, the word map induced by $w$ on a semisimple algebraic group over an arbitrary field is a flat morphism. Applications to representation varieties, subgroup growth, and random generation are also presented.
We give new, explicit and asymptotically sharp, lower bounds for dimensions of irreducible modular representations of finite symmetric groups.
This paper is a continuation of [GLT], which develops a level theory and establishes strong character bounds for finite simple groups of linear and unitary type in the case that the centralizer of the element has small order compared to $|G|$ in a logarithmic sense. We strengthen the results of [GLT] and extend them to all groups of classical type.