Skew-Morphisms of Elementary Abelian p-Groups

A skew-morphism of a finite group $G$ is a permutation $\sigma$ on $G$ fixing the identity element, and for which there exists an integer function $\pi$ on $G$ such that $\sigma(xy)=\sigma(x)\sigma^{\pi(x)}(y)$ for all $x,y\in G$. It has been known that given a skew-morphism $\sigma$ of $G$, the product of $\langle \sigma \rangle$ with the left regular representation of $G$ forms a permutation group on $G$, called the skew-product group of $\sigma$. In this paper, the skew-product groups of skew-morphisms of finite elementary abelian $p$-groups are investigated. Some properties, characterizations and constructions about that are obtained

Lie theory and coverings of finite groups

We introduce the notion of an `inverse property' (IP) quandle C which we propose as the right notion of `Lie algebra' in the category of sets. To any IP quandle we construct an associated group G_C. For a class of IP quandles which we call `locally skew' and when G_C is finite we show that the noncommutative de Rham cohomology H^1(G_C) is trivial aside from a single generator \theta that has no classical analogue. If we start with a group G then any subset C\subseteq G\setminus {e} which is ad-stable and inversion-stable naturally has the structure of an IP quandle. If C also generates G then we show that G_C \twoheadrightarrow G with central kernel, in analogy with the similar result for the simply-connected covering group of a Lie group. We prove that G_C\twoheadrightarrow G is an isomorphism for all finite crystallographic reflection groups W with C the set of reflections, and that C is locally skew precisely in the simply laced case. This implies that H^1(W)=k when W is simply laced, proving in particular a previous conjecture for S_n. We obtain similar results for the dihedral groups D_{6m}. We also consider C=Z P^1\cup Z P^1 as a locally skew IP-quandle `Lie algebra' of SL_2(Z) and show that G_C\cong B_3, the braid group on 3 strands. The map B_3\twoheadrightarrow SL_2(Z) which arises naturally as a covering map in our theory, coincides with the restriction of the universal covering map \widetilde {SL_2(R)}\to SL_2(R) to the inverse image of SL_2(Z).Comment: 14 pages, one pdf graphic (minor improvements