Asymptotic growth of finite groups (Q1277007)

In this article (which forms part of her doctoral thesis), the author introduces the notion of (word) growth for infinite families of finite groups together with generating sets of bounded size in the following way. Let \({\mathcal G}=(G_i)_{i\in I}\) be a family of finite groups which have generating sets of uniformly bounded size, and let \({\mathcal S}=(S_i)_{i\in I}\) be such a generating family for \(\mathcal G\); then the growth function of \(\mathcal G\) with respect to \(\mathcal S\) is defined as \[ \gamma^{\mathcal G}_{\mathcal S}(n)=\max_{i\in I}\gamma^{G_i}_{S_i}(n), \] where \(\gamma^{G_i}_{S_i}\) is the usual (word) growth function for finitely generated groups. One can then define in the usual way when the growth of \(({\mathcal G},{\mathcal S})\) is called polynomial, exponential, subexponential, or intermediate. A family \(\mathcal G\) is called totally polynomial (exponential, \dots) if its growth with respect to any generating family of uniformly bounded size is polynomial (exponential, \dots). The paper proceeds to give a partial characterisation of families of groups having the different types of growth. There are strong analogies with the classical case of finitely generated infinite groups (a summary of these results is given in the first section of the paper), but there are also some interesting differences. The main results are as follows. 1. A family \(\mathcal G\) has polynomial growth with respect to some family \(\mathcal S\) of generating sets, if and only if it is a totally polynomial family, if and only if every group in the family contains a nilpotent subgroup of uniformly bounded nilpotency class and index. 2. There exist families \(\mathcal G\) with a generating family \(\mathcal S\) of intermediate growth; in this case, there are also generating families for \(\mathcal G\) with exponential growth. (In particular, there are no totally intermediate families.) 3. A family \(\mathcal G\) of soluble groups of uniformly bounded derived length is either totally polynomial or totally exponential. 4. The rank of a finite group is \(\max_H d(H)\), where \(H\) runs through all subgroups of \(G\), and \(d(H)\) denotes the minimal number of generators for \(H\). With this definition, we have that a family \(\mathcal G\) of finite groups with uniformly bounded rank is either totally polynomial or totally exponential. Results 1 and 3 are very much in parallel with the infinite groups case, whereas result 2 is specific to the situation considered here (the type of growth of an infinite group does not depend on the generating set).