Landau’s theorem on conjugacy classes for normal subgroups

Abstract

Landau’s theorem on conjugacy classes asserts that there are only finitely many finite groups, up to isomorphism, with exactly [Formula: see text] conjugacy classes for any positive integer [Formula: see text]. We show that, for any positive integers [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], there exist finitely many finite groups [Formula: see text], up to isomorphism, having a normal subgroup [Formula: see text] of index [Formula: see text] which contains exactly [Formula: see text] non-central [Formula: see text]-conjugacy classes. Upper bounds for the orders of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] are obtained; we use these bounds to classify all finite groups with normal subgroups having a small index and few [Formula: see text]-classes. We also study the related problems when we consider only the set of [Formula: see text]-classes of prime-power order elements contained in a normal subgroup.