Determination of conjugacy class sizes from products of characters. (Q1936508)

Motivated by a result of Robinson that shows that the character degrees of a finite group \(G\) can be determined by knowing the order of \(G\) and the number of ways the identity of \(G\) can be expressed as a product of commutators in \(G\), the authors prove analogous results by swapping the roles of character degrees and conjugacy class sizes. Namely, they show that the order of \(G\) and the multiplicity of the trivial character in \(\pi^n\), where \(\pi\) is the permutation character of \(G\), determines the conjugacy class sizes of \(G\). Their proof is elementary and different to that of Robinson. A conjugacy class \(\mathcal K\) has \(p\)-defect 0 if \(|\mathcal K|_p=|G|_p\). The authors' second theorem says that \(G\) has a conjugacy class of \(p\)-defect 0 if and only if there exists an irreducible character \(\varphi\) of \(G\) and a natural number \(n\geq 2\) such that the multiplicity of \(\varphi\) in \(\pi^n\) is not divisible by \(p\). This is an analog of a result of Strunkov which identifies when \(G\) has a \(p\)-block of defect 0 by counting solutions of elementary functions modulo \(p\). In this case the authors' proof is similar to that of Strunkov. In both theorems slightly different counting yields information about real conjugacy classes. A nicely written, thought-provoking paper.