New Beauville surfaces and finite simple groups

Abstract

In this paper we construct new Beauville surfaces with group either $\PSL(2,p^e)$, or belonging to some other families of finite simple groups of Lie type of low Lie rank, or an alternating group, or a symmetric group, proving a conjecture of Bauer, Catanese and Grunewald. The proofs rely on probabilistic group theoretical results of Liebeck and Shalev, on classical results of Macbeath and on recent results of Marion.