Possible Brauer trees (Q793147)

The purpose of the paper is to show that most trees do not occur as Brauer trees associated to a p-block with a cyclic defect group. For a tree \(\gamma\) (i.e., a finite connected undirected graph) with \(P_ 0\) a vertex and a natural number n, the tree \((\gamma,P_ 0)^ n\) is defined to be the union of n copies of \(\gamma\) with the vertices \(P_ 0\) identified. Two trees \(\alpha\) and \(\beta\) are said to be similar if there is a tree \(\gamma\) such that \(\alpha \simeq(\gamma,P_ 0)^ m\) and \(\beta\simeq(\gamma,P'_ 0)^ n\) for some vertices \(P_ 0\), \(P'_ 0\) of \(\gamma\) and natural numbers m, n. This similarity is an equivalence relation. The main result is as follows. Theorem. Let G be a finite group and let \(\tau\) be the Brauer tree associated to a p-block with a nontrivial cyclic defect group. Then \(\tau \simeq(\gamma,P_ 0)^ n\) for some natural number n, where \(P_ 0\) is the exceptional vertex (if there is an exceptional vertex). Furthermore, (i) \(\gamma\) has at most 248 edges, or (ii) \(\gamma\) is a straight line segment. The author first shows that there exists a simple group H which is involved in G and a group \(\tilde H\) where \(\tilde H=H\) if \(| H| =p\), \~H'\(=\tilde H\) and \~H/Z(\~H)\(\simeq H\) if \(| H| \neq p\), such that \(\tau\) is similar to the Brauer tree associated to a p-block of \(\tilde H\) with a cyclic defect group. The author then uses the classification of finite simple groups and examines various classes of finite simple groups to obtain the result.