Thursday, 26 April 2007

gr.group theory - Extensions isomorphic as groups but not congruent or pseudo-congruent

I'm looking for an example of a finite abelian group A and a finite group G acting trivially on A such that there are two extensions $E_1$ and $E_2$ with base A and quotient G (i.e., they are both central extensions, and hence both give corresponding elements of $H^2(G,A)$) and:



  1. $E_1$ and $E_2$ are isomorphic as abstract groups.

  2. Under the natural action of $operatorname{Aut}(G) times operatorname{Aut}(A)$ on $H^2(G,A)$ (by pre- and post-composition with 2-cocycles that then descends to action on cohomology classes), the cohomology classes corresponding to $E_1$ and $E_2$ are not in the same orbit.

Basically condition (2) states that $E_1$ and $E_2$ are not only not congruent extensions, they are not even congruent up to a relabeling of the subgroup A and the quotient G. Another way of putting this is that there is no isomorphism between $E_1$ and $E_2$ that sends the A inside $E_1$ to the A inside $E_2$.



The analogous statement with a nontrivial action of G on A is also of interest to me. In this latter case, though, the entire group $operatorname{Aut}(G) times operatorname{Aut}(A)$ does not act.



I think that examples exist (because of my experience with finding examples for similar specifications) but there may well be a proof to the contrary.

No comments:

Post a Comment