Conjugacy classes of centralizers in unitary groups (Q667021)

Let \(G\) be a group. Two elements \(x\) and \(y\in G\) are said to be \(z\)-equivalent, denoted as \(x\sim _{z}y\), if their centralizers in \(G\) are conjugate, i.e., \(Z_{G}(y)=gZ_{G}(x)g^{-1}\) for some \(g\in G\), where \( Z_{G}(x)\) denotes the centralizer of \(x\) in \(G\). Clearly, \(\sim _{z}\)is an equivalence relation on G. The equivalence classes with respect to this relation are called \(z\)-classes. It is easy to see that if two elements of a group G are conjugate, then their centralizers are conjugate thus they are also z-equivalent. However, in general, the converse is not true. Now consider \(F\) a perfect field of characteristic \(\neq \)2, which has a non-trivial Galois automorphism of order 2. Further, suppose that the fixed field \(F_{0}\) has the property that it has only finitely many field extensions of any finite degree. In this paper, the authors prove that the number of \(z\)-classes in the unitary group over such fields is finite. Further, they count the number of \(z\)-classes in the finite unitary group \( U_{n}(q)\), and prove that this number is the same as that of GL\(_{n}(q)\) when \(q>n\).