Hopf-Galois structures on non-normal extensions of degree related to Sophie Germain primes (Q2229982)

Let \(L/K\) be a separable extension with normal closure \(E/K\). Set \(G = \mathrm{Gal}(E/K)\) and \(G' =\mathrm{Gal}(E/L)\). In [J. Algebra 106, 239--258 (1987; Zbl 0615.12026)], \textit{C. Greither} and \textit{B. Pareigis} showed that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the Hopf-Galois structures on \(L/K\) and certain regular subgroups \(N\) in the group \(\mathrm{Perm}(G/G')\) of all permutations of \(G/G'\). In particular, any such \(N\) has order equal to the degree of \(L/K\), and its isomorphism class is called the \textit{type} of the corresponding Hopf-Galois structure. Although this correspondence is valid for all separable extensions, most of the work in the literature focuses on Galois extensions. The Galois case is not only easier, but it has potential applications in Galois module theory and it has connections with skew braces (see the Appendix of [\textit{A. Smoktunowicz} and \textit{L. Vendramin}, J. Comb. Algebra 2, 47--86 (2018; Zbl 1416.16037]). \textit{A. A. Alabdali} and \textit{N. P. Byott} [J. Algebra 559, 58--86 (2020; Zbl 1465.12005)] enumerated the Hopf-Galois structures on any Galois extensions \(L/K\) of squarefree degree. One key ingredient of the proof is the classification of groups of squarefree order due to \textit{M. R. Murty} and \textit{V. K. Murty} [Math. Ann. 267, 299--309 (1984; Zbl 0531.10048)]. In particular, such groups are split metacyclic and their structures are fairly easy to understand. The paper under review takes the next natural step and considers non-normal separable extensions \(L/K\) of squarefree degree. This seems to be much harder than the Galois case because \(G\) no longer has squarefree order and there is no a priori classification of what \(G\) can be. Moreover, unlike Galois extensions, non-normal separable extensions might admit no Hopf-Galois structures at all. It was shown that for \(L/K\) (of squarefree degree) to admit at least one Hopf-Galois structure, necessarily \(G\) has derived length at most \(4\) (Theorem 3.3), but this condition is very far from being sufficient (Theorem 3.4). The paper under review then restricts to the special case when the degree is the product \(pq\) of two distinct odd primes \(p,q\) such that \(p = 2q + 1\) (so \(q\) is a Sophie Germain prime and \(p\) is a safeprime). There are only two groups \(N\) of order \(pq\), namely the cyclic group \(C_{pq}\) and the non-abelian split metacyclic group \(C_p\rtimes C_q\). For each of these two \(N\), the authors determined the possible \(G\) for which \(L/K\) admits a Hopf-Galois structure of type \(N\), and they counted the number of Hopf-Galois structures of type \(N\) for any such \(L/K\) (Tables 3 and 5).