Nested wreath groups and their applications to phylogeny in biology and Cayley trees in chemistry and physics

Abstract

Nested wreath product groups arise from looped or recursive structures that contain repeated copies of the same structure one within the other. Phylogeny trees in biology, Cayley trees, Bethe lattices, NMR graphs of non-rigid molecules, ammoniated ammonium ions are all examples of structures that exhibit such nested wreath product automorphism groups. We show that the conjugacy classes, irreducible representations and character tables of these nested group structures can be generated using multinomial generating functions cast in terms of matrix types that can be simplified into generalized cycle type polynomials. The nested wreath product groups rapidly increase in orders, for example, a simple wreath product group \(\hbox {S}_{7}[\hbox {S}_{7}]\) consists of \((7!)^{8}\) or \(4.1633\times 10^{23}\) operations, 481,890 conjugacy classes, spanning a 481,891 \(\times \) 481,891 character table that would occupy 232,217,972 pages. We have obtained powerful recursive relations for the conjugacy classes, character tables and the orders of various conjugacy cases of any nested wreath product \(\{[\hbox {S}_{\mathrm{n}}]\}^{\mathrm{m}}\) or \(\hbox {S}_{\mathrm{n}}[\hbox {S}_{\mathrm{n}}[\hbox {S}_{\mathrm{n}}{\ldots }.[\hbox {S}_{\mathrm{n}}]]{\ldots }.]\) with order \(\left( {n!}\right) ^{a_m},\,\hbox {a}_{\mathrm{m}}=(\hbox {n}^{\mathrm{m}}-1)/(\hbox {n}-1)\). We have obtained the character tables of phylogenetic trees of any order, character tables of Cayley trees of degrees 3 and 4 and for Cayley trees of larger degrees, we have derived exact analytical expressions for the conjugacy classes and IRs for up to \(\{[\hbox {S}_{7}]\}^{\mathrm{m}}\) with order \((7!)^{137257}\) for \(\hbox {m}=7\). Applications to colorings of phylogenic trees in biology are considered.