Covering numbers for simple algebraic groups (Q6073856)

Let \(G\) be a group and let \(C \subseteq G\) be a subset of \(G\). For every \(k \in \mathbb{N}\) let \[C^{k}=\{c_{1}\cdot c_{2} \cdot \ldots \cdot c_{k} \mid c_{1}, c_{2}, \ldots, c_{k} \in G \}.\] The covering number \(\operatorname{cn}(G,C)\) is defined to be the minimal value of \(k\) such that \(C^{k}=G\) (or \(\operatorname{cn}(G,C)=\infty\) if no such \(k\) exists). The paper under review is devoted to the study of covering numbers in simple algebraic groups over an algebraically closed field. The main result is the following: {Theorem 1.} There is a constant \(c\) such that for any simple algebraic group \(G\) over an algebraically closed field \(K\) and any non-central conjugacy class \(C\) of \(G\), we have \(\operatorname{cn}(G,C) \leq c\cdot \frac{\dim G}{\dim C}\). Moreover, this holds with \(c = 120\). In fact, the proof gives smaller values of the constant \(c\) in most cases: specifically \(c=27\) if \(G\) is of type \(A_{\ell}\), \(c=36\) if \(G\) is of type \(C_{\ell}\), \(c=120\) if \(G\) is of type \(B_{\ell}\) or \(D_{\ell}\), \(c=18\) if \(G\) is of exceptional type. The previous theorem has many interesting corollaries. Among them, the reviewer cites the following: {Corollary 3.} Let \(r \geq 2\) be an integer, and let \(G\) be an adjoint simple algebraic group over \(K\) such that \(G\) contains an element of order \(r\). Then every element of \(G\) can be expressed as a product of at most \(2c\) elements of order \(r\), all of which can be chosen from the same conjugacy class of \(G\).