lattice of subgroups
Let be a group and be the set of all subgroups of . Elements of can be ordered by the set inclusion relation
. This way becomes a partially ordered set
.
For any , define by . Then is a subgroup of and hence an element of . It is not hard to see that is the largest subgroup of both and .
Next, let and define by , the subgroup of generated by . So . Each element in is a finite product of elements from and . Again, it is easy to see that is the smallest subgroup of that has and as its subgroups.
With the two binary operations and , becomes a lattice
. It is a bounded lattice
, with as the top element and as the bottom element. Furthermore, if is a set of subgroups of indexed by some set , then both
are subgroups of . So is a complete lattice. From this, it is easy to produce a lattice which is not a subgroup lattice of any group.
Atoms in , if they exist, are finite cyclic groups of prime order (or , where is a prime), since they have no non-trivial proper subgroups
.
Remark. Finding lattices of subgroups of groups is one way to classify groups. One of the main results in this branch of group theory states that the lattice of subgroups of a group is distributive (http://planetmath.org/DistributiveLattice) iff is locally cyclic.
It is generally not true that the lattice of subgroups of a group determines the group up to isomorphism. Already for groups of order , or , for all primes, there are examples of groups with isomorphic (http://planetmath.org/LatticeIsomorphism) subgroup lattices which are not isomorphic groups
.
Example. Note that . Therefore it is possible to from a non-trivial semidirect product . The lattice of subgroups of is the same as the lattice of subgroups of . However, is non-abelian
while is abelian
so the two groups are not isomorphic.
Similarly, the groups and for any and any primes also have isomorphic subgroup lattices while one is non-abelian and the other abelian. So this is indeed a family of counterexamples.
Upon inspecting these example it becomes clear that the non-abelian groups have a different sublattice of normal subgroups
. So the question can be asked whether two groups with isomorphic subgroup lattices including matching up conjugacy classes
(so even stronger than matching normal subgroups) can be non-isomorphic groups. Surprisingly the answer is yes and was the dissertation of Ada Rottländer[1], a student of Schur’s, in 1927. Her example uses groups already discovered by Otto Hölder in his famous classification of the groups of order , , and . With the modern understanding of groups the counterexample is rather simple to describe – though a proof remains a little tedious.
Let where is a prime – that is is the 2-dimensional vector space over the field . Let be another prime. As , so if we write multiplicatively so that we have for every, is an automorphism
of .(Note that is often called a primitive -th root of unity in as it spans the subgroup of .) Furthermore, for any we get an automorphism given by
Therefore to every we can define a group , as a subgroup of . That is to say, where the action of on is given by: for every , for set
We are now prepared to give the Rottländer counterexample.
Now let and be integers between and such that is not congruent to modulo . Notice this already forces so our smallest example is and . Then is not isomorphic to (compare the eigenvalues of to – they are not equal so the linear transformations are not conjugate in .) However, and have isomorphic subgroup lattices including matching conjugacy classes.
References
- 1 Rottländer, Ada,Nachweis der Existenz nicht-isomorpher Gruppen von gleicherSituation der Untergruppen,Math. Z. vol. 28, 1928, 1, pp. 641– 653, ISSN 0025-5874.MR MR1544982,