Languages associated with saturated formations of groups

In a previous paper, the authors have shown that Eilenberg's variety theorem can be extended to more general structures, called formations. In this paper, we give a general method to describe the languages corresponding to saturated formations of groups, which are widely studied in group theory. We recover in this way a number of known results about the languages corresponding to the classes of nilpotent groups, soluble groups and supersoluble groups. Our method also applies to new examples, like the class of groups having a Sylow tower.The authors are supported by Proyecto MTM2010-19938-C03-01 from MICINN (Spain). The first author acknowledges support from MEC. The second author is supported by the project ANR 2010 BLAN 0202 02 FREC. The third author was supported by the Grant PAID-02-09 from Universitat Politècnica de València