On projective characters of prime degree

Abstract

All groups G considered in this paper are finite and all representations of G are defined over the field of complex numbers. The reader unfamiliar with projective representations is referred to [9] for basic definitions and elementary results.Let Proj(G, α) denote the set of irreducible projective characters of a group G with cocycle α. In a previous paper [3] the author showed that if G is a (p, α)-group, that is the degrees of the elements of Proj(G, α) are all powers of a prime number p, then G is solvable. However Isaacs and Passman in [8] were able to give structural information about a group G for which ξ(1) divides pe for all ξ ∈ Proj(G, 1), where 1 denotes the trivial cocycle of G, and indeed classified all such groups in the case e = l. Their results rely on the fact that G has a normal abelian p-complement, which is false in general if G is a (p, α)-group; the alternating group A4 providing an easy counter-example for p = 2.