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JOURNAL OF
ALGEBRAIC
COMBINATORICS

  Editors-in-chief: C. A. Athanasiadis, T. Lam, A. Munemasa, H. Van Maldeghem
ISSN 0925-9899 (print) • ISSN 1572-9192 (electronic)
 

Orbit equivalence and permutation groups defined by unordered relations

Francesca Dalla Volta1 and Johannes Siemons2
1Dipartimento di Matematica e Applicazioni, Università Milano Bicocca, 20125 Milano, Italy
2School of Mathematics, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ UK

DOI: 10.1007/s10801-011-0313-5

Abstract

For a set Ω  an unordered relation on Ω  is a family R of subsets of Ω . If R is such a relation we let G( R) \mathcal{G}(R) be the group of all permutations on Ω  that preserve R, that is g belongs to G( R) \mathcal{G}(R) if and only if x\in  R implies x g \in  R. We are interested in permutation groups which can be represented as G= G( R) G=\mathcal{G}(R) for a suitable unordered relation R on Ω . When this is the case, we say that G is defined by the relation R, or that G is a relation group. We prove that a primitive permutation group \neq Alt( Ω ) and of degree \geq 11 is a relation group. The same is true for many classes of finite imprimitive groups, and we give general conditions on the size of blocks of imprimitivity, and the groups induced on such blocks, which guarantee that the group is defined by a relation.

Pages: 547–564

Keywords: keywords group invariant relations; regular sets; orbit closure; automorphism groups of set systems

Full Text: PDF

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