Sharply 2-transitive groups. (Q907860)

The finite sharply \(2\)-transitive groups were classified by H. Zassenhaus in the 1930's, they are Frobenius groups of the form \(G=NH\) with \(N\) normal and such that \(|H|=|N|-1\). The last equality implies that in \(N\) there is a unique conjugacy class of non trivial elements and this forces \(N\) to be an elementary abelian \(p\)-group for some prime \(p\). It remained an open question whether the infinite sharply 2-transitive groups admit an abelian normal subgroup. The first counterexamples were recently constructed by \textit{E. Rips, Y. Segev} and \textit{K. Tent} [``A sharply 2-transitive group without a non-trivial abelian normal subgroup'' \url{arXiv:1406.0382} (2014)]; in these examples involutions have no fixed points. In the paper under review the authors give an alternative approach to such a construction by using partially defined group actions. As a corollary they prove that any group can be extended to a group acting sharply 2-transitively on some appropriate set without nontrivial abelian normal subgroup.