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 $k$ conjugacy classes for any positive integer $k$. We show that, for any positive integers $n$ and $s$, there exists only a finite number of finite groups $G$, up to isomorphism, having a normal subgroup $N$ of index $n$ which contains exactly $s$ non-central $G$-conjugacy classes. We provide upper bounds for the orders of $G$ and $N$, which are used by using GAP to classify all finite groups with normal subgroups having a small index and few $G$-classes. We also study the corresponding problems when we only take into account the set of $G$-classes of prime-power order elements contained in a normal subgroup.