Adequate Subgroups II

The notion of adequate subgroups was introduced by Jack Thorne. It is a weakening of the notion of big subgroup used by Wiles and Taylor in proving automorphy lifting theorems for certain Galois representations. Using this idea, Thorne was able to prove some new lifting theorems. In an appendix to Thorne's article, it was shown in that certain groups were adequate. One of the key aspects was the question of whether the span of the semsimple elements in the group is the full endomorphism ring of an absolutely irreducible module. We show that this is the case in prime characteristic p for p-solvable groups as long the dimension is not divisible by p. We also observe that the condition holds for certain infinite groups. Finally, we present the first examples showing that this condition need not hold and give a negative answer to a question of Richard Taylor.Comment: to appear in Bulletin of Mathematical Science

On a subfactor generalization of Wall's conjecture

In this paper we discuss a conjecture on intermediate subfactors which is a generalization of Wall's conjecture from the theory of finite groups. We explore special cases of this conjecture and present supporting evidence. In particular we prove special cases of this conjecture related to some finite dimensional Kac Algebras of Izumi-Kosaki type which include relative version of Wall's conjecture for solvable groups.Comment: 16 page

Products of conjugacy classes and fixed point spaces

We prove several results on products of conjugacy classes in finite simple groups. The first result is that there always exists a uniform generating triple. This result and other ideas are used to solve a 1966 conjecture of Peter Neumann about the existence of elements in an irreducible linear group with small fixed space. We also show that there always exist two conjugacy classes in a finite non-abelian simple group whose product contains every nontrivial element of the group. We use this to show that every element in a non-abelian finite simple group can be written as a product of two rth powers for any prime power r (in particular, a product of two squares).Comment: 44 page

Simple groups admit Beauville structures

We answer a conjecture of Bauer, Catanese and Grunewald showing that all finite simple groups other than the alternating group of degree 5 admit unmixed Beauville structures. We also consider an analog of the result for simple algebraic groups which depends on some upper bounds for character values of regular semisimple elements in finite groups of Lie type and obtain definitive results about the variety of triples in semisimple regular classes with product 1. Finally, we prove that any finite simple group contains two conjugacy classes C,D such that any pair of elements in C x D generates the group.Comment: 30 pages, in the second version, some results are improved and in particular we prove an irreducibility for a certain variet