Groups admitting an automorphism of prime order with finite centralizer. (Q2255078)

An automorphism \(\varphi\) of a group \(G\) is called \textit{almost regular} if the set \(C_G(\varphi)\) of all elements of \(G\) fixed by \(\varphi\) is finite. In the paper under review, the authors study almost regular automorphisms of groups with suitable rank finiteness conditions. Among other results, they prove that if \(G\) is a group with finite Hirsch length \(h\) and \(\varphi\) is an almost regular automorphism of \(G\) of prime order \(p\), then \(G\) contains a \(\varphi\)-invariant nilpotent normal subgroup \(N\) such that the class of \(N\) is bounded in terms of \(p\) and the index \(|G:N|\) is at most \(f(p,np^h)\) for a suitable function \(f\), where \(n=|C_G(\varphi)|\). Recall here that the group \(G\) is said to have finite Hirsch length \(h\) if it has a series of finite length whose factors are either locally finite or infinite cyclic, and \(h\) is the number of infinite cyclic factors in such a series.