Differential posets and restriction in critical groups

In recent work, Benkart, Klivans, and Reiner defined the critical group of a faithful representation of a finite group $G$, which is analogous to the critical group of a graph. In this paper we study maps between critical groups induced by injective group homomorphisms and in particular the map induced by restriction of the representation to a subgroup. We show that in the abelian group case the critical groups are isomorphic to the critical groups of a certain Cayley graph and that the restriction map corresponds to a graph covering map. We also show that when $G$ is an element in a differential tower of groups, critical groups of certain representations are closely related to words of up-down maps in the associated differential poset. We use this to generalize an explicit formula for the critical group of the permutation representation of the symmetric group given by the second author, and to enumerate the factors in such critical groups.Comment: 18 pages; v2: minor edits and updated reference

Two Examples of Toric Arrangements

We show that the integral cohomology algebra of the complement of a toric arrangement is not determined by the poset of layers. Moreover, the rational cohomology algebra is not determined by the arithmetic matroid (however it is determined by the poset of layers).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, removed section