Inducing braces and Hopf Galois structures (Q6038529)

A brace is a triple \((A,+,\cdot)\) such that \((A,+)\) and \((A,\cdot)\) are groups, with the compatibility \(a\cdot(b+c)=a\cdot b-a+a\cdot c\). If \(A\) is an abelian group, then \((A,+,\cdot)\) is a brace, called trivial. It is proved that if \(p\) is a prime and if any group of cardinal \(np\) has a normal subgroup of cardinality \(p\), then any brace of order \(np\) is a direct or semi-direct product of the trivial brace of order \(p\) by a brace of order \(n\). Moreover, in this situation, a one-to-one correspondence is given between braces of order \(np\) and pairs made by a brace of order \(n\) and a specific group morphism. This is used to give a formula counting Hopf Galois structures of abelian type \(\mathbb{Z}_p\times E\) on a Galois extension of degree \(np\) in terms of the number of Hopf Galois structures of abelian type \(E\) on a Galois extension of degree \(n\). These results are applied to prove a conjecture on the number of braces of order \(12p\), when \(p\) is a prime number different from \(2,3,5\), and to compute the number of Hopf Galois extensions of abelian type on a Galois extension of order \(12p\).