Confined subgroups in periodic simple finitary linear groups (Q701371)

This long paper is impressive, both for what it does and for the range of techniques and knowledge it exhibits. It considers only locally finite groups \(G\). A subgroup \(X\) of \(G\) is confined if there is a finite subgroup \(F\) of \(G\) such that \(X\cap F^g\neq\langle 1\rangle\) for every \(g\) in \(G\). There is some evidence, especially in several works of B. Hartley and A. E. Zalesskii (see references of the paper under review), of a link between proper confined subgroups of \(G\) and nontrivial ideals of the group algebra of \(G\) over the complexes. The motivation for this paper seems to stem from this. The authors' project here is to determine the confined subgroups of the periodic simple finitary linear groups. Since the alternating groups and the special transvection groups have been largely dealt with by other authors, the current work focuses mainly on the finitary symplectic, finitary unitary and finitary orthogonal groups. As to be expected of a work of this nature, its detailed content is difficult to summarise. To give some idea of its contents we close by quoting its Theorem A. Let \(G\) be a classical finitary linear group of isometries relative to a non-degenerate symplectic, unitary or quadratic form. Suppose \(G\) admits its natural finitary representation on the infinite-dimensional vector space \(V\) over the finite field \(k\) and let \(X\) denote a confined subgroup of \(G\). Then there is a unique minimal \(X\)-invariant subspace \(W\) of finite co-dimension in \(V\). Further the following hold. (a) If \(\text{char }k=2\) and if \(G\) is a finitary symplectic group, then the symplectic bilinear form can be related to a quadratic form \(q\) on \(V\) with the property that \(X\cap H\) has finite index in \(N_H(W)\), where \(H\) denotes the finitary orthogonal subgroup of \(G\) preserving \(q\). (b) In all other cases \(X\) has finite index in \(N_G(W)\).