Quasi-isolated blocks and the Alperin-McKay conjecture

Abstract

The Alperin-McKay conjecture is a longstanding open conjecture in the representation theory of finite groups. Sp\"ath showed that the Alperin-McKay conjecture holds if the so-called inductive Alperin-McKay (iAM) condition holds for all finite simple groups. In a previous paper, the author has proved that it is enough to verify the inductive condition for quasi-isolated blocks of groups of Lie type. In this paper we show that the verification of the iAM-condition can be further reduced in many cases to isolated blocks. As a consequence of this we obtain a proof of the Alperin-McKay conjecture for 2-blocks of finite groups with abelian defect.