An algorithm for computing a supercharacter theory generated from a given partition

Let [Formula: see text] be a finite group. The set of all supercharacter theories of [Formula: see text] forms a lattice, where the join operation coincides with the join operation on the lattice of partitions of [Formula: see text], with partial order given by refinement. The meet operation is more complicated however, and seems difficult to describe. In this paper, we outline algorithms for determining the coarsest supercharacter theory whose associated partition is finer than a given partition. One of the primary applications is to compute the supercharacters and superclasses for the meet of two supercharacter theories.

Normal Supercharacter Theory

International audience There are three main constructions of supercharacter theories for a group G. The first, defined by Diaconis and Isaacs, comes from the action of a group A via automorphisms on our given group G. Another general way to construct a supercharacter theory for G, defined by Diaconis and Isaacs, uses the action of a group A of automor- phisms of the cyclotomic field Q[ζ|G|]. The third, defined by Hendrickson, is combining a supercharacter theories of a normal subgroup N of G with a supercharacter theory of G/N . In this paper we construct a supercharacter theory from an arbitrary set of normal subgroups of G. We show that when we consider the set of all normal subgroups of G, the corresponding supercharacter theory is related to a partition of G given by certain values on the central primitive idempotents. Also, we show the supercharacter theories that we construct can not be obtained via automorphisms or a single normal subgroup.

Vanishing-off subgroups and supercharacter theory products

In this paper, we study the vanishing-off subgroups of supercharacters, and use these to determine several new characterizations of supercharacter theory products. In particular, we give a character theoretic characterization that allows us to conclude that one may determine if a supercharacter theory is a [Formula: see text]-product or ∗-product from the values of its corresponding supercharacters.

Shell Tableaux: A Set Partition Analog of Vacillating Tableaux

Schur–Weyl duality is a fundamental framework in combinatorial representation theory. It intimately relates the irreducible representations of a group to the irreducible representations of its centralizer algebra. We investigate the analog of Schur–Weyl duality for the group of unipotent upper triangular matrices over a finite field. In this case, the character theory of these upper triangular matrices is "wild" or unattainable. Thus we employ a generalization, known as supercharacter theory, that creates a striking variation on the character theory of the symmetric group with combinatorics built from set partitions. In this paper, we present a combinatorial formula for calculating a restriction and induction of supercharacters based on statistics of set partitions and seashell inspired diagrams. We use these formulas to create a graph that encodes the decomposition of a tensor space, and develop an analog of Young tableaux, known as shell tableaux, to index paths in this graph.