On the transfer in the homology of symmetric groups

Abstract

The transfer has long been a fundamental tool in the study of group cohomology. In recent years, symmetric groups and a geometric version of the transfer have begun to play an important role in stable homotopy theory (2, 5). Thus, motivated by geometric considerations, we have been led to investigate the transfer homomorphismin group homology, where n is the nth symmetric group, (n, p) is a p-Sylow sub-group and simple coefficients are taken in /p (the integers modulo a prime p). In this paper, we obtain an explicit characterization (Theorem 3·8) of this homomorphism. Roughly speaking, elements in H*(n) are expressible in terms of the wreath product k ∫ l → n (n = kl) and the ordinary product k × n−k→ n. We show that tr* preserves the form of these elements.