New Beauville surfaces and finite simple groups (Q382253)

The concept of Beauville surfaces was introduced by F. Catanese in 1997, and in 2000 their global rigidity was shown by \textit{F. Catanese} [Am. J. Math. 122, No. 1, 1--44, (2000; Zbl 0983.14013)]. In 2005, \textit{I. Bauer} et al. [Mediterr. J. Math. 3, No. 2, 121--146 (2006; Zbl 1167.14300)] first systematically studied Beauville surfaces, they constructed many new examples, and presented a lot of conjectures. Quite a number of these conjectures have been solved in the meantime and nowadays there exists a substantial literature on Beauville surfaces. A Beauville surface \(S\) is a surface isogenous to a higher product of curves, i.e. \(S = (C_1 \times C_2)/G\) is a quotient of a product of two smooth curves \(C_1\) and \(C_2\) of genera at least two, modulo a free action of a finite group \(G\), which is rigid, i.e. it has no non-trivial deformations. Beauville surfaces are either of \textit{mixed} or \textit{unmixed} type, according respectively as the \(G\)-action exchanges the two factors (then \(C_1\cong C_2\)) or \(G\) acts diagonally on the product \(C_1\times C_2\). There is a pure group theoretical condition which characterizes the groups of Beauville surfaces: the existence of a ``Beauville structure''. In the paper under review the author focus on the unmixed case: a finite group \(G\) admits an unmixed Beauville structure if there exist two pairs of generators \((x_1 ,y_1)\) and \((x_2 ,y_2 )\) for \(G\) such that \(\Sigma(x_1 ,y_1)\cap \Sigma(x_2 ,y_2 )=\{1_G\}\), where, \(\Sigma(x,y)\) (for \(x,y\in G\)) is the union of conjugacy classes of all powers of \(x\), all powers of \(y\), and all powers of \(xy\). Moreover the triple \((\mathrm{ord}(x_i), \mathrm{ord}(y_i), \mathrm{ord}(x_iy_i))\) is called the type of \(T_i:=(x_i,y_i)\). In the paper under review, the authors prove that several finite simple groups admit an unmixed Beauville structure. In particular they show that \(\mathrm{PSL}(2,p^e)\) and some other families of finite simple groups of Lie type of low Lie rank (e.g. Suzuki groups, Ree groups, etc.) admit an unmixed Beauville structure. Moreover for the alternating and symmetric groups they prove the stronger result that almost all of these groups admit an unmixed Beauville structure with fixed types. In particular these last result completely solves Conjecture 7.18 of Bauer, Catanese and Grunewald [Zbl 1167.14300].