The Benson -- Symonds Invariant for Ordinary and Signed Permutation Modules

Abstract

The signed permutation modules are a simultaneous generalization of the ordinary permutation modules and the twisted permutation modules of the symmetric group. In a recent paper Dave Benson and Peter Symonds defined a new invariant $\gamma_G(M)$ for a finite dimensional module $M$ of a finite group $G$ which attempts to quantify how close a module is to being projective. In this paper, we determine this invariant for all the signed permutation modules of the symmetric group using tools from representation theory and combinatorics.