The fundamental group of the Quillen complex of the symmetric group (Q1888802)

Given a finite group \(G\) and a prime \(p\), let \({\mathcal A}_p(G)\) denote the poset (partially ordered set) of all non-trivial elementary abelian \(p\)-subgroups of \(G\) and \(\Delta {\mathcal A}_p(G)\) the Quillen complex of \(G\) given by the ordered complex of the poset \({\mathcal A}_p(G)\). In this paper the author studies the fundamental group of \(\Delta {\mathcal A}_p(G)\) where \(G\) is a symmetric group \(S_n\) of \(n\) letters and \(p\geq 3\) is an odd prime. In particular, he shows that it is simply connected if and only if \(3p+2\leq n<p^2\) or \(n\geq p^2+p\), and he determines the fundamental group \(\pi_1(\Delta {\mathcal A}_p(S_n))\) in all cases except those where \(p\geq 5\) and \(n\in \{3p,3p+1\}\) and that where \((p,n)=(3,10)\). To prove these results he uses \(p\)-partition complexes \({\mathcal D}_p(m)\) and some long exact sequence of \(AS_{n-1}\)-modules \(H_*({\mathcal D}_p(m),A)\) whose terms are made up from the homology modules of \({\mathcal D}_p(m)\)'s.