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For disambiguation see at wreath product.
Given (discrete) groups and a G-set , the wreath product group
is the semidirect product group of
the direct product group of copies of
with , acting on by permutation of factors:
(cf. BMMN 2006, Def. 8.1, see also James & Kerber 1984 §4.1)
(Notation) Other notation for “” is “” or “”.
Often the choice of -set is notationally suppressed, writing instead “”, etc.
But beware that conventions differ:
Some authors understand by default the regular action of on its underlying set.
But when is a symmetric group, then often its defining action on is understood (cf. Ex. below). In this case James & Kerber 1984 §4.2 speak of complete monomial groups over .
The dihedral group of order is the wreath product of with itself (in this sense of regular representations).
More generally:
The symmetry group of the -dimensional hypercube is .
The Sylow--subgroups of the symmetric groups can be recursively described as the wreath product where is the cyclic group of order and with .
The Sylow--subgroups of for can recursively be described as a wreath product of the Sylow--subgroup of a strictly smaller and a Sylow--subgroups of a suitable symmetric group.
For a connected topological space , the homotopy quotient of its -fold product topological space by the symmetric group acting by permutation of factors, hence the Borel construction
has as fundamental group the wreath product with the fundamental group of :
A framed braid group is the wreath product with the integers of a plain braid group.
(as a permutation group)
If both and are presented as permutation groups, then the wreath product is itself a permutation group, acting on the Cartesian product set by letting act trivially on the first and naturally on the second factor and letting act on such that the -th component of permutes naturally and fixes everything else pointwise.
Let be a finite group. Denote by the set of isomorphism classes of its irreducible representations.
For and an -partition, in that , write
There is an evident linear representation of
on
where the subgroup acts according to the external tensor product of representations, and the subgroup acts by permutation of tensor factors.
The irreps of the direct product group are (see there) of the form
for an irrep of the symmetric group . We may canonically regard as a representation of .
For a finite group and , the irreducible representations of the wreath product group are, up to isomorphism, exactly the induced representations along of the tensor products of representations (1) for an -partition as above, with irreps (2) of :
This is a digest of James & Kerber 1984 Thm. 4.3.34, for the special case that their “” is all of . For proper subgroups the analogous statement holds for the irreps of , with above replaced throughout by .
(Irreps of )
For denote by the cyclic group of order . Its complex irreps are all 1-dimensional, labeled by : The element acts on as multiplication with .
The irreps of are the trivial representation , the sign representation and the standard representation .
The irreps of according to Thm. may be regarded as falling into 3 classes, according to the nature of the corresponding partition:
Case 1 – Partition involves a single irrep . In this case and the formula (3) produces the representations
for and .
Case 2 – Partition involves two distinct irreps, and . In this case and the formula (3) produces
for and .
Case 3 – Partition involves three distinct irreps, . In this case and the formula (3) produces
for pairwise distinct.
Monographs:
See also:
In the generality of semigroups:
Special cases and applications:
G. Baumslag: Wreath products and extensions, Math Z 81 (1963) 286-299 [doi:10.1007/BF01111576]
I. G. Macdonald: Polynomial functors and wreath products, J. Pure Appl. Alg. 18 (1980) 173-204 [doi:10.1016/0022-4049(80)90128-0, pdf]
On the representation theory of wreath products with symmetric groups:
Gordon D. James, Adalbert Kerber: Representations of Wreath Products, Chapter 4 of: The Representation Theory of the Symmetric Group, Cambridge University Press (1984) [doi:10.1017/CBO9781107340732]
I. A. Pushkarev: On the representation theory of wreath products of finite groups and symmetric groups, Journal of Mathematical Sciences, 96 (1999) 3590–3599 [doi:10.1007/BF02175835]
originally in: Representation theory, dynamical systems, combinatorial and algorithmic methods. Part II, Zap. Nauchn. Sem. POMI 240, POMI, St. Petersburg (1997) 229–244 [mathnet:znsl475]
On wreath products of a cyclic with a symmetric group as analogs of (anyon) braid groups in dimension :
On wreath products with braid groups (cf. also framed braid group):
Last revised on April 19, 2025 at 10:54:59. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.