Cyclic characters of alternating groups (Q7302440)

The paper determines, with multiplicities, the eigenvalues of every element of an alternating group \(A_n\) in every irreducible complex representation. Equivalently, it determines the decomposition into irreducible constituents of the representations induced from linear characters of cyclic subgroups. For an irreducible representation obtained by restricting a representation \(V_\lambda\) of \(S_n\), the multiplicities are expressed in terms of Stembridge's tableau statistic. When \(\lambda\) is self-conjugate and \(V_\lambda\) splits as \(V_\lambda^+\oplus V_\lambda^-\) over \(A_n\), an explicit arithmetic formula describes the difference between the corresponding multiplicities in \(V_\lambda^+\) and \(V_\lambda^-\). In particular, the paper gives necessary and sufficient conditions for this difference to be nonzero and bounds its absolute value in terms of the product of the parts of the cycle type. The invariant-vector problem is then solved completely. Every element \(w\in A_n\) has a nonzero invariant vector in every irreducible representation \(V\), except when \(V=V_{(2,1)}^\pm\) and \(w\) has cycle type \((3)\), when \(V=V_{(2,2)}^\pm\) and \(w\) has cycle type \((3,1)\), when \(V=V_{(4,4)}\) and \(w\) has cycle type \((5,3)\), or when \(V=V_{(n-1,1)}\), \(n>3\) is odd and \(w\) is an \(n\)-cycle. This also yields the complete classification of irreducible unisingular representations of alternating groups. Finally, the paper constructs families of global conjugacy classes. If \(\mu\) is a partition with at least two odd parts and no part occurs more than twice, then the conjugacy classes in \(A_n\) with cycle type \(\mu\) are global precisely when \(\mu\) is different from \((3,1)\), \((3,3)\), \((5,3)\) and \((3,3,1,1)\). Consequently, for \(n>8\), every row sum of the character table of \(A_n\) is positive and is at least twice the number of self-conjugate partitions of \(n\).