English

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 pp-subgroup of a finite group could contain only elements whose orders are powers of pp. Marston Conder gives a positive answer to this question in the case of p=5p=5. 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 pp.

Keywords

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}
}