On the Cluster Category of a Marked Surface

We study in this paper the cluster category C(S,M) of a marked surface (S,M). We explicitly describe the objects in C(S,M) as direct sums of homotopy classes of curves in (S,M) and one-parameter families related to closed curves in (S,M). Moreover, we describe the Auslander-Reiten structure of the category C(S,M) in geometric terms and show that the objects without self-extensions in C(S,M) correspond to curves in (S,M) without self-intersections. As a consequence, we establish that every rigid indecomposable object is reachable from an initial triangulation.Comment: 33 pages, we add a new corollary 1.6 which shows there is a bijection between triangulations of (S,M) and the cluster-tilting objects of C(S,M), and every rigid indecomposable object is reachable from an initial triangulatio

Fixed conjugacy classes of normal subgroups and the k(GV)-problem

We establish several new bounds for the number of conjugacy classes of a finite group, all of which involve the maximal number c of conjugacy classes of a normal subgroup fixed by some element of a suitable subset of the group. To apply these formulas effectively, the parameter c, which in general is hard to control, is studied in some important situations. These results are then used to provide a new, shorter proof of the most difficult case of the well-known k(GV)-problem, which occurs for p=5 and V induced from the natural module of a 5-complement of GL(2,5). We also show how, for large p, the new results reduce the k(GV)-problem to the primitive case, thereby improving previous work on this. Furthermore, we discuss how they can be used in tackling the imprimitive case of the as of yet unsolved noncoprime k(GV)-problem

Orbifolds of Lattice Vertex Operator Algebras at d=48d=48 and d=72d=72

Motivated by the notion of extremal vertex operator algebras, we investigate cyclic orbifolds of vertex operator algebras coming from extremal even self-dual lattices in $d=48$ and $d=72$. In this way we construct about one hundred new examples of holomorphic VOAs with a small number of low weight states.Comment: 18 pages, LaTe