Irreducible constituents of minimal degree in supercharacters of the finite unitriangular groups

Abstract

Let $q$ be a prime power and $U$ the group of lower unitriangular matrices of order $n$ for some natural number $n$. We give a lower bound for the degrees of irreducible constituents of Andr\'{e}-Yan supercharacters and classify the supercharacters having constituents whose degree assume this lower bound. Moreover we show that the number of distinct irreducible characters of $U$ meeting this condition is a polynomial in $(q-1)$ with nonnegative integral coefficients and exhibit monomial sources for those.