The probability that a character value is zero for the symmetric group.

DOI10.1007/S00209-014-1290-XMaRDI QIDQ2509934zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors A. Miller

Publication date 31 July 2014

Published in Mathematische Zeitschrift (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.1219

zbMATH Keywords

alternating groupscharacter valuesirreducible charactersMurnaghan-Nakayama rulepartitionsrandom charactersrandom elementssymmetric groups

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Combinatorial aspects of representation theory (05E10) Representations of finite symmetric groups (20C30) Probabilistic methods in group theory (20P05)

Abstract: We consider random character values X(g) of the symmetric group on n symbols, where X is chosen at random from the set of irreducible characters and g is chosen at random from the group, and we show that X(g)=0 with probability tending to one as n tends to infinity.

Review text

The paper under review proves the striking result that if \(\chi\) is chosen uniformly at random from the irreducible characters of \(S_n\), and \(g\) is chosen uniformly at random from \(S_n\), then \(\mathbb P[\chi(g)=0]\to 1\) as \(n\to\infty\). The analogous result for alternating groups is also proved. The proof is elegant and simple enough to summarize here: a result of Erdős and Lehmer states, very roughly, that most partitions of \(n\) have about \(\sqrt n\log n\) parts. Hence the longest border-strip in a typical partition of \(n\) has length \(O(\sqrt n\log n)\). However by a theorem of Goncharov, all but \(o(n!)\) permutations in \(S_n\) have a cycle of length at least \(n/(2\log n)\). So by the Murnaghan-Nakayama rule, a typical character value \(\chi(g)\) must vanish. The final section of the paper considers the vanishing probability \(P(G)\) for a general finite simple group \(G\). The author raises the following question: `Let \(P_\varepsilon\) be the proportion of finite simple groups \(G\) of size less than \(n\) which satisfy \(P(G)>1-\varepsilon\). Then is it true that for every \(\varepsilon>0\) one has that \(P_\varepsilon\to 1\) as \(n\to\infty\)?' Another interesting question arises if rather than choose \(g\in S_n\) uniformly at random, we instead choose a conjugacy class uniformly at random.

Recommendations

• On parity and characters of symmetric groups
• Character degrees and random walks in finite groups of Lie type
• On values of irreducible characters of finite simple groups
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Cites work

• Group characters and commutators
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3771876 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 862502 (Why is no real title available?)
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3104489 (Why is no real title available?)
• The distribution of the number of summands in the partitions of a positive integer
• The trace of totally positive and real algebraic integers

Cited in

(13)

• On parity and characters of symmetric groups
• On the divisibility of character values of the symmetric group
• Groups with a small average number of zeros in the character table
• Almost all entries in the character table of the symmetric group are multiples of any given prime
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 5152183 (Why is no real title available?)
• Character degrees and random walks in finite groups of Lie type
• The sparsity of character tables of high rank groups of Lie type
• Zeros in the character tables of symmetric groups with an -core index
• Character theory and categorification. Abstracts from the workshop held August 28 -- September 3, 2022
• Common zeros of irreducible characters
• Large-scale Monte Carlo simulations for zeros in character tables of symmetric groups
• Degrees and prime power order zeros of characters of symmetric and alternating groups
• Character and class parameters from entries of character tables of symmetric groups

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