Conjugacy classes, characters and products of elements

Abstract

Recently, Baumslag and Wiegold proved that a finite group $G$ is nilpotent if and only if $o(xy)=o(x)o(y)$ for every $x,y\in G$ of coprime order. Motivated by this result, we study the groups with the property that $(xy{)}^G=x^G{y}^G$ and those with the property that $\chi (xy)=\chi (x)\chi (y)$ for every complex irreducible character $\chi$ of $G$ and every nontrivial $x,y\in G$ of pairwise coprime order. We also consider several ways of weakening the hypothesis on $x$ and $y$. While the result of Baumslag and Wiegold is completely elementary, some of our arguments here depend on (parts of) the classification of finite simple groups.

9 pages