Irreducible characters of even degree and normal Sylow 22-subgroups

The classical It\^o-Michler theorem on character degrees of finite groups asserts that if the degree of every complex irreducible character of a finite group $G$ is coprime to a given prime $p$, then $G$ has a normal Sylow $p$-subgroup. We propose a new direction to generalize this theorem by introducing an invariant concerning character degrees. We show that if the average degree of linear and even-degree irreducible characters of $G$ is less than $4/3$ then $G$ has a normal Sylow $2$-subgroup, as well as corresponding analogues for real-valued characters and strongly real characters. These results improve on several earlier results concerning the It\^o-Michler theorem.Comment: 16 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1506.0645

Adequate groups of low degree

The notion of adequate subgroups was introduced by Jack Thorne [42]. It is a weakening of the notion of big subgroups used in generalizations of the Taylor-Wiles method for proving the automorphy of certain Galois representations. Using this idea, Thorne was able to strengthen many automorphy lifting theorems. It was shown in [22] that if the dimension is small compared to the characteristic then all absolutely irreducible representations are adequate. Here we extend the result by showing that, in almost all cases, absolutely irreducible kG-modules in characteristic p, whose irreducible G+-summands have dimension less than p (where G+ denotes the subgroup of G generated by all p-elements of G), are adequate.Comment: 60 page