Semicharacters of Groups

Abstract

We define the notion of a semicharacter of a group G : A function from the group to C*, whose restriction to any abelian subgroup is a homomorphism. We conjecture that for any finite group, the order of the group of semicharacters is divisible by the order of the group. We prove that the conjecture holds for some important families of groups, including the Symmetric groups and the groups GL(2,q).