English

Tiling the symmetric group by transpositions

Combinatorics 2026-05-05 v3 Representation Theory

Abstract

For nonempty subsets XX and YY of a group GG, we say that (X,Y)(X,Y) is a tiling of GG if every element of GG can be uniquely expressed as xyxy for some xXx\in X and yYy\in Y. In 1966, Rothaus and Thompson studied whether the symmetric group SnS_n with n3n\geq3 admits a tiling (Tn,Y)(T_n,Y), where TnT_n consists of the identity and all the transpositions in SnS_n. They showed that no such tiling exists if 1+n(n1)/21+n(n-1)/2 is divisible by a prime number at least n+2\sqrt{n}+2. In this paper, we establish a new necessary condition for the existence of such a tiling: the subset YY must be partition-transitive with respect to certain partitions of nn. This generalizes the result of Rothaus and Thompson, as well as a result of Nomura in 1985. We also study whether SnS_n can be tiled by the set TnT_n^* of all the transpositions, which finally leads us to conjecture that neither TnT_n nor TnT_n^* tiles SnS_n for any n4n\geq4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.00360,
  title  = {Tiling the symmetric group by transpositions},
  author = {Teng Fang and Binzhou Xia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00360},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:51:58.050Z