Abelian actions on compact bordered Klein surfaces (Q506272)

The automorphism group of a bordered Klein surface of algebraic genus \(p \geq 2\) has order at most \(12(p-1)\). The most useful tool for obtaining these automorphism groups is the uniformization of Klein surfaces and their automorphism groups by means of non-Euclidean crystallographic (NEC in short) groups. The paper under review is devoted to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for a finite abelian group \(A\) to be an automorphism group of a bordered Klein surface of algebraic genus \(p \geq 2\). This fact happens if and only if there exists an epimorphism \(\theta\) from a certain NEC group \(\Lambda\) onto \(A\), such that the kernel of \(\theta\) is a so-called surface NEC group of genus \(p\). According to that, the fundamental result of the paper is Theorem 1, which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of the epimorphism \(\theta\). In order to get them, the author factorizes \(\theta\) through the abelianization of \(\Lambda\), for which he obtains a presentation by generators and relations. As corollaries of this important theorem, the author obtains easily a handful of known results. They correspond to the problems of minimal genus and maximum order. More precisely, the real genus of a group is the least algebraic genus of the bordered Klein surfaces on which it acts, whilst the maximum order problem consists on obtaining the largest order of a group acting on a surface of a given algebraic genus. Both questions were solved for abelian groups back in 1990, and are recovered here. Also, the author considers and computes a new parameter, the least real genus of the abelian groups of a given order. The paper is very carefully written and self-contained, and gives an important step in the study of automorphism groups of bordered Klein surfaces. Besides, it includes a very useful list of references for these problems on Riemann and Klein surfaces.