On varieties of groups generated by wreath products of abelian groups

Vahagn H. Mikaelian

Published 2018-01-06Version 1

Generalizing results of Higman and Houghton on varieties generated by wreath products of finite cycles, we prove that the (direct or cartesian) wreath product of arbitrary abelian groups $A$ and $B$ generates the product variety $var (A) \cdot var (B)$ if and only if one of the groups $A$ and $B$ is not of finite exponent, or if $A$ and $B$ are of finite exponents $m$ and $n$ respectively and for all primes $p$ dividing both $m$ and $n$, the factors $B[p^k]/B[p^{k-1}]$ are infinite, where $B[s]=\langle b\in B|\,b^{s}=1 \rangle$ and where $p^k$ is the highest power of $p$ dividing $n$.