On Automorphisms of Finite $p$-groups

In this survey article, we try to summarize the known results towards the long-standing non-inner automorphism conjecture, which states that every finite non-abelian $p$-group has a non-inner automorphism of order $p$.

Suppose that p is an odd prime and G is a finite group having no normal non-trivial p'-subgroup. We show that if a is an automorphism of G of p-power order centralizing a Sylow p-group of G, then a is inner. This answers a conjecture of Gross. An easy corollary is that if p is an odd prime and P is a Sylow p-subgroup of G, then the center of P is contained in the generalized Fitting subgroup of G. We give two proofs both requiring the classification of finite simple groups. F...

In this paper, we discuss a group-theoretical generalization of the well-known Gauss formula involving the functionthat counts the number of automorphisms of a finite group. This gives several characterizations of finite cyclic groups.

Let $G$ be a finite group and $N(G)$ be the set of its conjugacy class sizes. In the 1980's Thompson conjectured that the equality $N(G)=N(S)$, where $Z(G)=1$ and $S$ is simple, implies the isomorphism $G\simeq S$. In a series of papers of different authors Thompson's conjecture was proved. In this paper, we show that in some cases it is possible to omit the conditions $Z(G)=1$ and $S$ is simple and prove a more general result.

It is shown that if G is a finite p-group of coclass 2 with p > 2, then G has a noninner automorphism of order p.

Let $G$ be a finite group and $n_p(G)$ the number of Sylow $p$-subgroups of $G$. In this paper, we prove if $n_p(G)<p^2$ then almost all numbers $n_p(G)$ are a power of a prime.

We give an accessible and modern description of the automorphisms of a finite abelian group $G$. Included is an explicit formula for the cardinality of $Aut(G)$.

For each finite $p$-group of class 2 presented as a central extension of an abelian $p$-group by another one, we present a practical methed for computing its automorphism group.

We study finite p-groups G of coclass upto 4 for which the group Aut_z(G) of all central automorphisms of G is of minimal possible order. As a consequence, we obtain very short and elementary proofs of main results of Sharma and Gumber [7].

Let $G$ be a finite $p$-group of nilpotency class 2. We find necessary and sufficient conditions on $G$ such that each central automorphism of $G$ fixes the center of $G$ element-wise.