Groups with three projective characters

Abstract

Working over the field of complex numbers, the inequivalent irreducible projective representations of a finite group G with 2-cocycle α are considered. The greatest common divisor of the degrees of the α-characters of these representations is used to obtain information about the degrees of the irreducible αS -characters of a Sylow subgroup S of G. Suppose now that G has exactly three irreducible α-characters. Then the potential form that the three degrees can take is found if G has a nontrivial cyclic Sylow subgroup. However, the main result is to show that G is solvable when the degrees are of the form a, ra and ka with certain restrictions on r and k, most notably that r = 1 or k. This involves detailed analysis of the possible actions of G on the irreducible αN -characters of a normal subgroup N of G.