On Zappa's question in the case of alternating groups
Group Theory
2026-03-11 v1
Abstract
In 1962, Guido Zappa asked whether a non-trivial coset of a Sylow -subgroup of a finite group could contain only elements whose orders are powers of . Marston Conder gives a positive answer to this question in the case of . It is known that the smallest group satisfying the conditions of this problem must be a non-abelian simple group. In this paper, we prove that the smallest group of the Zappa problem could not be an alternating simple group for any prime .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.09369,
title = {On Zappa's question in the case of alternating groups},
author = {Ru Zhang and Rulin Shen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.09369},
year = {2026}
}