On products of locally polycyclic groups (Q2639174)

In order to obtain information about a normal subgroup of a factorized group one often has to consider triply factorized groups of the form \(G=AB=AK=BK\), where A and B are subgroups and K is a normal subgroup of G. Here it is shown that G is locally polycyclic whenever A, B and K are locally polycyclic provided that one of the following two conditions is satisfied: (i) K is a minimax group or (ii) G is soluble with finite abelian section rank. - It should be observed that there exist triply factorized groups with abelian subgroups A, B and an abelian normal subgroup K with Prüfer rank 1, but G is not locally polycyclic. The proofs of the above results use cohomological arguments and facts about automorphisms of soluble minimax groups that depend on Algebraic Number Theory.