Cyclic complements and skew morphisms of groups. (Q5965112)

Given a group \(A\), a permutation \(\varphi\) of the elements of \(A\) that fixes the identity of \(A\) is said to be a skew morphism of \(A\) with associated power function \(\pi\colon A\to\mathbb Z\) if \(\varphi(ab)=\varphi(a)\varphi^{\pi(a)}(b)\) for all \(a,b\in A\). The kernel of \(\varphi\) is the subgroup of all \(x\in A\) for which \(\pi(x)=1\). This notion was introduced in the context of regular Cayley maps, however a crucial observation in the paper is that the study of the skew morphisms of \(A\) is essentially equivalent to analyse whether and how a group \(G\) can be expressed as a complementary product \(AB\) of a subgroup isomorphic to \(A\) and a cyclic, core-free, subgroup \(B\). Hence the language and theory of skew morphisms make it possible to say much more about such group factorisations than appears to have been possible in the past. The authors present a number of previously unknown properties of skew morphisms. For example they prove that the order of every skew morphism of \(A\) is less than \(|A|\) and that the kernel of every skew morphism of a non-trivial finite group is non-trivial. The central part of the paper is about skew morphisms of finite abelian groups. In particular, the authors determine all skew morphisms of the finite abelian groups whose order is prime, or the square of a prime, or the product of two distinct primes and completely determine the finite abelian groups for which every skew morphism is an automorphism. Another section is about the skew morphisms of dihedral groups: the most significant result is that for every prime \(p>3\), every skew morphism of the dihedral group \(D_p\) is an automorphism. In the last section an easy inductive argument allows to prove that if \(A\) is a finite cyclic group, then the subgroup of \(\mathrm{Sym}(A)\) generated by all skew morphisms of \(A\) is soluble.