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(Burnside marks and Burnside character)
Let be a finite group and let any finite G-set. For the conjugacy class of a subgroup , the -mark on is the cardinality of the set of -fixed points, hence the natural number
of elements such that for each we have .
This construction extends to a ring homomorphism
from the Burnside ring to the ring of tuples of integers of length the number of conjugacy classes of subgroups of .
This morphism is also called the Burnside character or mark homomorphism.
(marks in terms of homs)
Equivalent the set of -marks of a G-set (Def. ) is the hom-set in GSet from to .
This follows from a basic standard argument. For completeness, we make it explicit:
By transitivity of the action on a -equivariant function is fully specified by its image of the equivalence class of the neutral element. Since this is fixed precisely by the elements in it may, again by -equivariance, be mapped to any -fixed point .
Of particular interest are the marks of the transitive G-sets, i.e. those isomorphic to sets of coset, for a subgroup. These arrange into a table of marks:
The table of Burnside marks (or table of marks, for short) of a finite group is the matrix indexed by conjugacy classes of subgroups whose -entry is the -marks of (Def. ), hence the number of fixed points of the action of on the coset space :
(e.g. Pfeiffer 97, chapter The Burnside Ring and the Table of Marks)
(table of marks in terms of homs)
The expression of marks in terms of homs (Remark ) means here that the table of marks (Def. ) is equivalently given by
The following Prop. that the Burnside character plays the same role for finite G-sets as characters of representations play for finite-dimensional linear representations, in that it faithfully reflects -sets. In fact the marks of a -set over cyclic subgroups coincides with the character of its permutation representation over any ground field (Prop. ) below.
(Burnside character is injective)
The Burnside character (1) is injective. Hence any two finite G-sets are isomorphic precisely if they have the same Burnside marks (Def. ).
(e.g. tomDieck 79, Prop. 1.2.2, tomDieck 09, Prop. 5.1.1)
(mark homomorphism on cyclic groups agrees with characters of corresponding permutation representations)
For a finite G-set, for any field and the corresponding permutation representation, the character of the permutation representation at any equals the Burnside marks (Def. ) of under the cyclic group generated by :
Hence the mark homomorphism (Def. ) of -sets restricted to cyclic subgroups coincides with the characters of their permutation representations.
This statement immediately generalizes from plain representations to virtual representations, hence to the Burnside ring.
(e.g. tom Dieck 09, (2.15))
By definition of character of a linear representation, we have that
is the trace of the linear endomorphism of the given permutation representation.
Now the canonical -linear basis for is of course the set itself, and so
Here in the first step we spelled out the definition of trace in the canonical basis, and in the second step we observed that the fixed point set of a cyclic group equals that of any one of its generating elements.
We discuss, in Prop. below, how the table of marks encodes the product in the Burnside ring of the given finite group . For this purpose we first consider two Lemma: Lemma and Lemma .
(linear order on set of conjugacy classes of subgroups)
There exists a linear order on the set of conjugacy classes of subgroups of such that a subgroup inclusion implies that .
This follows by the general existence of linear extensions of partial orders applied to the subgroup lattice of .
(table of marks is lower triangular invertible matrix)
With respect to any linear order on the conjugacy classes of subgroups as in Lemma , the table of marks (Def. ) becomes a lower triangular matrix over the integers with non-zero entries on the diagonal. In particular, it is an invertible matrix.
That the subgroup has any fixed points in means that there is a such that for all , and thus that is a subgroup of , or in other words, that is conjugate to a subgroup of . Hence
and thus the matrix is lower triangular.
Since at least is fixed by , we moreover have that the diagonal entries are non-zero.
In the following, given a G-set we write for its isomorphism class, regarded as an element in the Burnside ring.
(Burnside multiplicities)
Given a choice of linear order on the conjugacy classes of subgroups of (for instance as in Lemma ), we say that the corresponding structure constants of the Burnside ring (or Burnside multiplicities) are the natural numbers
uniquely defined by the equation
(Burnside ring product in terms of table of marks)
The Burnside ring structure constants (Def. ) are equal to the following algebraic expression in the table of marks and its inverse matrix (which exists by Lemma ):
Let be the dimension of , i.e. is a matrix. For any , we compute as follows:
Here the third step uses the defining equation (2) of the structure constants , while all other steps use that the mark homomorphism is a ring homomorphism, which we made manifest by expressing the marks via hom-sets (Remark ).
Thus we have that is a solution to the following system of equations.
But, since is invertible, the unique solution to this system of equations is given by the product of and the transposition of . The claim follows immediately.
The table of marks of a finite group determines its Burnside ring. That is to say, if the tables of marks of a pair of groups and are equal, then the Burnside ring of is isomorphic to the Burnside ring of .
The Burnside ring of a finite group is a free abelian group on the set , where are representatives of the conjugacy classes of that group, equipped with a certain multiplication. Thus it suffices to check that the structure constants of the Burnside rings coincide, which is established by the previous proposition.
The concept was introduced in
William Burnside, chapter XII of Theory of Groups of Finite Order, 1897 (pdf)
William Burnside, On the Representation of a Group of Finite Order as a Permutation Group, and on the Composition of Permutation Groups, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 1901 (doi:10.1112/plms/s1-34.1.159)
Modern textbook accounts and lecture notes:
Tammo tom Dieck, Transformation Groups and Representation Theory Lecture Notes in Mathematics 766 Springer 1979
Tammo tom Dieck, sections 5.1 and 5.4 of Representation theory, 2009 (pdf)
Klaus Lux, Herbert Pahlings, section 3.5 of Representations of groups – A computational approach, Cambridge University Press 2010 (author page, publisher page)
Computer implementation is discussed in
See also
Götz Pfeiffer, The Subgroups of , or How to Compute the Table of Marks of a Finite Group, Experiment. Math. 6 (1997), no. 3, 247–270 (doi:10.1080/10586458.1997.10504613, web)
Liam Naughton, Götz Pfeiffer, Computing the table of marks of a cyclic extension, Math. Comp. 81 (2012), no. 280, 2419–2438.
Brendan Masterson, Götz Pfeiffer, On the Table of Marks of a Direct Product of Finite Groups, Journal of Algebra Volume 499, 1 April 2018, Pages 610-644 (arXiv:1704.03433)
Last revised on June 3, 2020 at 15:05:49. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.