Conjugation invariants determine the metacommutation permutation only up to relabelling
Abstract
Let be the Hurwitz quaternions, an odd prime, and a prime of norm . Metacommutation induces a permutation of the left-associate classes of primes of norm . Cohn and Kumar compute its sign and fixed-point count, and Leite and Machiavelo its full cycle structure, by formulas depending only on conjugation-invariant data of (namely and ). We prove this is exactly the boundary of what such invariants can carry: no quantity invariant under unit conjugation determines as a labelled permutation of the intrinsic class set, or even the image of a single specified class. The proof combines an equivariance identity with a minimal, fully explicit witness at : the four primes , , , form a single unit-conjugacy orbit, hence agree under every conjugation-invariant function, yet induce four pairwise distinct -cycles of the same four classes. We further observe that isomorphisms form a torsor under , so no projective labelling of the classes is canonical, and that by orbit-stabilizer the datum of one destination is exactly a coset in . All sixteen refactorizations in the witness are listed in the appendix and have been verified by machine along two independent routes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2608.01610,
title = {Conjugation invariants determine the metacommutation permutation only up to relabelling},
author = {Matthew Fried},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.01610},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
7 pages