Locally finite simple groups as a product of two inert subgroups (Q1317617)

A subgroup \(H\) of a group \(G\) is diagonal if \(G\) contains an \(H\)-pair, i.e. there exist two subgroups \(A\) and \(B\) such that (i) \([A, B] \leq A \cap B\), (ii) \(H \leq AB\), (iii) \(A \cap H = B \cap H = 1\). This notion is useful to show that certain locally finite groups can be written as a product of two inert subgroups. Here a subgroup \(H\) of the group \(G\) is inert in \(G\) if \(H \cap H^ g\) has finite index in \(H\) for every element \(g\) in \(G\). For instance it is easy to see that every countable locally finite group whose finite subgroups are diagonal is in many ways factorizable as a product of two residually finite inert subgroups. Theorem: A locally finite simple group \(G\) which contains at least one nondiagonal finite subgroup is embeddable in the group of all finitary linear transformations \(FGL(V)\) for some vector space \(V\) (and is therefore known). It follows that a countable locally finite simple group which is not a finitary linear group always has an inert factorization. To prove these results the classification of finite simple groups is used to investigate finite simple groups with `small' nondiagonal subgroups.