Unisingular representations in arithmetic and Lie theory (Q2667151)

The paper is motivated by Lang's question whether a local-to-global principle can hold for abelian varieties \(A\) over a number field \(K\): If for all but finitely many primes \(p\) of \(K\) the group of \(\mathbb{F}_p\)-points of a reduction modulo \(p\) of \(A\) has size divisible by a fixed integer \(m\), does there exist a \(K\)-isogenous \(A'\) such that \(m\) divides the order of the torsion subgroup of \(A'(K)\)? \textit{N. M. Katz} [Invent. Math. 62, 481--502 (1981; Zbl 0471.14023)] showed that this can be translated into a representation-theoretic question for finite groups, and using this, he showed that the answer to Lang's question is negative in general. In the case \(m = p\) is a prime number, to explicitly construct abelian varieties that give a negative answer to Lang's question using Katz' translation, it boils down to determine finite subgroups \(G\) of \(\mathrm{Sp}_{2n}(p)\) such that every element \(g \in G\) has an eigenvalue \(1\). Such groups are called \textit{fixed-point} in the paper. The first main result of the paper classifies all irreducible fixed-point subgroups of \(\mathrm{Sp}_8(2)\). The authors also give explicit constructions of irreducible fixed-point subgroups of \(\mathrm{Sp}_{2n}(2)\) for various \(n\).