A construction for Fitting formations (Q1820233)

While examples of saturated Fitting formations abound, and include many of the well known classes, examples of non-saturated Fitting formations are very meagre. The first examples of non-saturated Fitting formations belong to Hawkes, Berger and Cossey. These examples were generalized in 1982 by Kanes in his Ph. D. thesis. The paper shows that all previous examples arise as special cases of a more general construction. All groups considered are finite and soluble. One supposes that for each group we have a class of modules defined, and that the family of these classes satisfies certain closure properties. A class of groups is constructed by using this family to place restrictions on the chief factors of the groups in the class. The class so defined is a Fitting formation. The problem to find appropriate classes of modules is then solved. The family given in this paper is inspired by the class of characters, called \(\pi\)-factorable characters, introduced by \textit{I. M. Isaacs} [J. Algebra 86, 98-128 (1984; Zbl 0526.20006)]. The so constructed Fitting formations are often, but not always, non-saturated. A description of the saturated ones is given.