Growth sequences of finite groups

Abstract

During his investigation of the possible non-Hopf kernels for finitely generated groups in [1], Dey proves that the minimum number of generators d(Gn) of the n-th direct power Gn of a non-trival finite group G tends to infinity with n. This has prompted me to ask the question: what are the ways in which the sequence {d(Gn)} can tend to infinity? Let us call this the growth sequence for G; it is evidently monotone non-decreasing, and is at least logarithmic (Theorem 2.1). This paper is devoted to a proof that, broadly speaking, there are two different types of behaviour. If G has non-trivial abelian images (the imperfect case, § 3), then the growth sequence of G is eventually an arithmetic progression with common difference d(G/G'). In special cases (Theorem 5.2) the initial behaviour can be quite nasty. Our arguments in § 3 are totally elementary. If G has only trivial abelian images (the perfect case,§ 4), then the growth sequence of G is eventually bounded above by a sequence that grows logarithmically. It is a simple consequence of this fact that there are arbitrarily long blocks of positive integers on which the growth sequence takes constant values. This is a characteristic property of perfect groups, and indeed it was this feature in the growth sequences of large alternating groups (which I found by using ad hoc permutational arguments) that attracted me to the problem in the first place. The discussion of the perfect case rests on the lovely paper of Hall [2], which was brought to my notice by M. D. Atkinson.