Extensions of characters in type D and the inductive McKay condition, I

TL;DR

This paper advances the understanding of automorphism actions on characters of finite groups of Lie type D, introducing new methods to analyze and extend characters, which is crucial for progress on the McKay conjecture.

Contribution

It provides a new proof of character extension results for type D groups and shows that a minimal counter-example to a key automorphism condition would still satisfy a related property.

Findings

New proof of character extension for Levi subgroups of type D

Control of automorphism actions on extended characters

Implications for the inductive McKay condition

Abstract

This is a contribution to the study of $\operatorname {Irr}(G)$ as an $\operatorname {Aut}(G)$-set for $G$ a finite quasi-simple group. Focusing on the last open case of groups of Lie type $\mathrm D$ and $^2\mathrm D$, a crucial property is the so-called condition $A'(\infty)$ expressing that diagonal automorphisms and graph-field automorphisms of $G$ have transversal orbits in $\operatorname {Irr}(G)$. This is part of the stronger $A(\infty)$ condition introduced in the context of the reduction of the McKay conjecture to a question on quasi-simple groups. Our main theorem is that a minimal counter-example to condition $A(\infty)$ for groups of type $\mathrm D$ would still satisfy $A'(\infty)$. This will be used in a second paper to fully establish $A(\infty)$ for any type and rank. The present paper uses Harish-Chandra induction as a parametrization tool. We give a new, more effective proof of the theorem of Geck and Lusztig ensuring that cuspidal characters of arbitrary standard Levi subgroups of $G={\mathrm D}_{ l,\mathrm{sc}}(q)$ extend to their stabilizers in the normalizer of that Levi subgroup. This allows to control the action of automorphisms on these extensions. From there Harish Chandra theory leads naturally to a detailed study of associated relative Weyl groups and other extendibility problems in that context.