Complete factorizations of finite abelian groups (Q6038517)

Let \(G\) be an abelian group and \(A_{1},A_{2},\dots,A_{k}\) (\(k\geq 2\)) be nonempty subsets of \(G\). The sets \(A_{1},A_{2},\dots,A_{k}\) are said to form a \textsl{complete factorization of order} \(k\) of \(G\) if \( A_{1},A_{2},\dots,A_{k} \) are mutually disjoint and each \(g\in G\) can be uniquely expressed as the sum of \(a_{1},a_{2},\dots,a_{k}\) with \(a_{i}\in A_{i} \) for each \(i=1,2,\dots,k\). If \(G\) is finite, then the \textit{size of a complete factorization} \(A_{1}A_{2},\dots,A_{k}\) of \(G\) is defined to be \( \sum\limits_{i=1}^{k}|Ai|\). In this paper, the finite abelian groups that have a complete factorization are characterized. The minimum size of a complete factorization of finite abelian groups is also determined. Specifically, here are the main results. {Theorem 2.6}. A \(k\times l\) system of product sets with matrix \( \mathcal{A}\) is solvable if \(\mathcal{A}\) has the property \(\mathcal{P}\) and \(k=2\). Here, the matrix \(\mathcal{A}\) is said to have \textsl{the property} \( \mathcal{P}\) if it satisfies the following conditions: for each \(j=1,2,\dots,l\) , (P1) if \(|A_{j}|\geq 3\), then the sets \(A_{j_{1}},A_{j_{2}},\dots,A_{j_{k}}\), \( U_{j}\) are mutually disjoint; (P2) if \(|A_{j}|=2\), say \(A_{j}=\{i_{1},i_{2}\}\), then \(A_{ji_{1}}\cap Uj=\emptyset \) and \(|A_{ji_{2}}\cap U_{j}|\leq 1\). {Theorem 2.9}. Let \(G\) be a finite abelian group and let \( m_{1},m_{2},\dots,m_{k}\) be integers greater than one such that \( |G|=\sum\limits_{i=1}^{k}m_{i}\). There exists a proper complete factorization \(A_{1},A_{2},\dots,A_{k}\) of \(G\) with \(|A_{i}|=m_{i}\) for each \( i=1,2,\dots,k\) if and only if \(k\geq 3\). {Corollary 2.10}. A finite abelian group \(G\) has a complete factorization if and only if \(\Omega (|G|)\geq 3\). Here for a positive integer \(n\), the \textit{prime omega function}, denoted by \(\Omega (n)\), is defined to be the total number of prime divisors of \(n\), including their multiplicity. {Theorem 2.13.} Let \(G\) be a finite abelian group and let \( p_{1}\dots p_{m}\) be a prime factorization of \(|G|\). If \(G\) has a complete factorization of order \(k\), then \(Min_{k}(G)=\sigma _{k}(|G|)\) and \( Min(G)=\sum\limits_{i=1}^{m}p_{i}\). Here for positive integers \(n\) and \(k\), \(C_{k}(n)= \{(m_{1},\dots,m_{k})|n=m_{1}\dots m_{k},m_{i}\in N,i=1,\dots,k\}\) and \(\sigma _{k}(n)=\min_{\alpha \in Ck(n)}l(\alpha )\), where \( l(m_{1},\dots,m_{k})=m_{1}+\dots +m_{k}\).