`Norman involutions' and tensor products of unipotent Jordan blocks (Q2631884)

Let $N_{m}$ be the $m\times m$ nilpotent matrix over a field $F$ with entries $1$ in the $(i,i+1)$th positions ($i=1,\dots,m-1$) and $0$ elsewhere. Then, the tensor product $N_{r}\otimes N_{s}$ ($r\leq s$) has Jordan canonical form (JCF) $(s-r+1)N_{r}\oplus\bigoplus_{i}2N_{\mu_{i}}$ for some partition $(\mu_{1},\mu_{2},\dots)$ of $\frac{1}{2}r(r-1)$ which is independent of the field. In contrast, for the Jordan blocks $J_{m}:=I_{m}+N_{m}$ with eigenvalue $1$, $J_{r}\otimes J_{s}$ has JCF of the form $\bigoplus_{i}J_{\lambda_{i}}$ where the partition $\lambda(r,s,p)=(\lambda_{1},\lambda_{2}\dots)$ of $rs$ always has $r$ parts but depends on the characteristic $p$ of $F$. If $p=0$ or $p\geq r+s-1$, then it is known that: (*) $\lambda_{n}=r+s+1-2n$ for each $n$ (see Corollary 1 of \textit{B. Srinivasan} [Proc. Lond. Math. Soc. (3) 14, 677--688 (1964; Zbl 0123.02801)]). A partition satisfying (*) is called a standard partition. \par If $p>0$, then there are rather complicated algorithms to compute $\lambda(r,s,p)$ (see, for example, [\textit{J. C. Renaud}, J. Algebra 58, 1--11 (1979; Zbl 0406.20011)]) but dependence on $p$ is difficult to determine. The object of the present paper is to investigate combinatorics of $\lambda(r,s,p)$ which are independent of $p$. Its starting point is Theorem 2.2.9 of \textit{K.-I. Iima} and \textit{R. Iwamatsu} [Math. J. Okayama Univ. 51, 133--148 (2009; Zbl 1164.15001)], where it is shown that for all $\lambda(r,s,p)$ we have: (**) $\,\lambda_{i}-\lambda_{j}$ $\neq j-i$ (for all $i$ and $j$) and $1\leq\lambda_{n}-s+n\leq r$ (for all $n$). \par For each partition $\lambda$ of $rs$ with $r$ parts and satisfying (**), the authors define a permutation $\pi_{\lambda}$ in the symmetric group $S_{r}$ by $n^{\pi_{\lambda}}:=r+1-n+s-\lambda_{n}$ for $n=1,\dots,r$. The permutation $\pi_{\lambda}$ is called a Norman permutation associated with $\lambda$ and $\pi(r,s,p)$ denotes the Norman permutation associated with $\lambda(r,s,p)$ (see page 353 of \textit{C. W. Norman} [Linear Multilinear Algebra 38, No. 4, 351--371 (1995; Zbl 0830.15005)]). Note that $\pi_{\lambda}=1$ exactly when $\lambda$ is a standard partition. The main results of the present paper are the following. There is a new criterion for $\lambda(r,s,p)$ to be a standard permutation, expressed by inequalities between remainders of various expressions after division by $p$ and its powers (Theorem 2.3). It is also shown that $\pi_{\lambda}^{2}=1$ for every Norman permutation (Corollary 4.2) and that the subgroup $G(r,p):=\left\langle \pi(r,s,p)~|~s\geq r\right\rangle \leq S_{r}$ is a wreath product $S_{a}\wr D_{b}$ where $a$ is the $p^{\prime}$-part of $r$, $b$ is the $p$-part of $r$, and $D_{b}$ is the dihedral group of order $2b$ (Theorem 2.5).