Abelian sections of the symmetric groups with respect to their index

Abstract

We show the existence of an absolute constant $\alpha>0$ such that, for every $k \geq 3$, $G:=\mathop{\mathrm{Sym}}(k)$, and for every $H \leqslant G$ of index at least $3$, one has $|H/[H,H]| \leq |G:H|^{\alpha/ \log \log |G:H|}$. This inequality is the best possible for the symmetric groups, and we conjecture that it is the best possible for every family of arbitrarily large finite groups.