Calculating conjugacy classes in Sylow -subgroups of finite Chevalley groups of rank six and seven

Let$G(q)$be a finite Chevalley group, where$q$is a power of a good prime$p$, and let$U(q)$be a Sylow$p$-subgroup of$G(q)$. Then a generalized version of a conjecture of Higman asserts that the number$k(U(q))$of conjugacy classes in$U(q)$is given by a polynomial in$q$with integer coefficients. In [S. M. Goodwin and G. Röhrle,J. Algebra321 (2009) 3321–3334], the first and the third authors of the present paper developed an algorithm to calculate the values of$k(U(q))$. By implementing it into a computer program using$\mathsf{GAP}$, they were able to calculate$k(U(q))$for$G$of rank at most five, thereby proving that for these cases$k(U(q))$is given by a polynomial in$q$. In this paper we present some refinements and improvements of the algorithm that allow us to calculate the values of$k(U(q))$for finite Chevalley groups of rank six and seven, except$E_7$. We observe that$k(U(q))$is a polynomial, so that the generalized Higman conjecture holds for these groups. Moreover, if we write$k(U(q))$as a polynomial in$q-1$, then the coefficients are non-negative.Under the assumption that$k(U(q))$is a polynomial in$q-1$, we also give an explicit formula for the coefficients of$k(U(q))$of degrees zero, one and two.

Shifted generic cohomology

The idea that the cohomology of finite groups might be fruitfully approached via the cohomology of ambient semisimple algebraic groups was first shown to be viable in the papers [E. Cline, B. Parshall, and L. Scott, Cohomology of finite groups of Lie type, I, Publ. Math. Inst. Hautes Études Sci. 45 (1975), 169–191] and [E. Cline, B. Parshall, L. Scott and W. van der Kallen, Rational and generic cohomology, Invent. Math. 39 (1977), 143–163]. The second paper introduced, through a limiting process, the notion of generic cohomology, as an intermediary between finite Chevalley group and algebraic group cohomology. The present paper shows that, for irreducible modules as coefficients, the limits can be eliminated in all but finitely many cases. These exceptional cases depend only on the root system and cohomological degree. In fact, we show that, for sufficiently large $r$, depending only on the root system and $m$, and not on the prime $p$ or the irreducible module $L$, there are isomorphisms ${\mathrm{H} }^{m} (G({p}^{r} ), L)\cong {\mathrm{H} }^{m} (G({p}^{r} ), {L}^{\prime } )\cong { \mathrm{H} }_{\mathrm{gen} }^{m} (G, {L}^{\prime } )\cong {\mathrm{H} }^{m} (G, {L}^{\prime } )$, where the subscript ‘gen’ refers to generic cohomology and ${L}^{\prime } $ is a constructibly determined irreducible ‘shift’ of the (arbitrary) irreducible module $L$ for the finite Chevalley group $G({p}^{r} )$. By a famous theorem of Steinberg, both $L$ and ${L}^{\prime } $ extend to irreducible modules for the ambient algebraic group $G$ with ${p}^{r} $-restricted highest weights. This leads to the notion of a module or weight being ‘shifted $m$-generic’, and thus to the title of this paper. Our approach is based on questions raised by the third author in [D. I. Stewart, The second cohomology of simple ${\mathrm{SL} }_{3} $-modules, Comm. Algebra 40 (2012), 4702–4716], which we answer here in the cohomology cases. We obtain many additional results, often with formulations in the more general context of ${ \mathrm{Ext} }_{G({p}^{r} )}^{m} $ with irreducible coefficients.