Faithful simple objects, orders and gradings of fusion categories

We establish some relations between the orders of simple objects in a fusion category and the structure of its universal grading group. We consider fusion categories which have a faithful simple object and show that its universal grading group must be cyclic. As for the converse, we prove that a braided nilpotent fusion category with cyclic universal grading group always has a faithful simple object. We study the universal grading of fusion categories with generalized Tambara-Yamagami fusion rules. As an application, we classify modular categories in this class and describe the modularizations of braided Tambara-Yamagami fusion categories.