Growth of cross-characteristic representations of finite quasisimple groups of Lie type

Abstract

In this paper we give a bound to the number of conjugacy classes of maximal subgroups of any almost simple group whose socle is a classical group of Lie type. The bound is 2n5.2+nlog2log2q, where n is the dimension of the classical socle and q is the size of the defining field. To obtain the bound, we first bound the number of projective cross-characteristic representations of simple groups of Lie type as a function of the representation degree. These bounds are computed for different families of groups separately. In the computation, we use information on conjugacy class numbers, minimal character degrees and gaps between character degrees.