The linearity of wreath products (Q4384737)

Nearly thirty years ago Yu. E. Vapne and, independently, the author classified those standard and complete wreath products that have faithful representations of finite degree over (commutative) fields. Recently, in connection with finitary linear groups, I needed a more general wreath product. Somewhat to my surprise neither the classification nor the proof for these generalized wreath products was a straightforward translation from the standard case, the situation being intrinsically more complex. Let \(A\) and \(H\) be two groups, let \(\Omega\) be a set and let \(\sigma\) be a homomorphism of \(H\) into the symmetric group on \(\Omega\). Let \(B\) be the direct product over \(\omega\) in \(\Omega\) of copies \(A_\omega\) of \(A\). Then \(H\) acts on \(B\) by permuting these copies of \(A\) via its action on \(\Omega\). The generalized wreath product of \(A\) and \(H\) that we mainly consider here is the split extension of \(B\) by \(H\). We determine the precise conditions for such a product to be isomorphic to a linear group. We also consider variants of this construction.