Extremal product-one free sequences and $|G|$-product-one free sequences of a metacyclic group

Abstract

Let $G$ be a multiplicatively written finite group. We denote by $\mathsf E(G)$ the smallest integer $t$ such that every sequence of $t$ elements in $G$ contains a product-one subsequence of length $|G|$. In 1961, Erd\H{o}s, Ginzburg and Ziv proved that $\mathsf E(G)\leq 2|G|-1$ for every finite abelian group $G$ and this result is known as the Erd\H{o}s-Ginzburg-Ziv Theorem. In 2005, Zhuang and Gao conjectured that $\mathsf E(G)=\mathsf d(G)+|G|$ for every finite group, where $\mathsf d(G)$ is the small Davenport constant. Very recently, we confirmed this conjecture for the case when $G=\langle x, y| x^p=y^m=1, x^{-1}yx=y^r\rangle$ where $p$ is the smallest prime divisor of $|G|$ and $\mbox{gcd}(p(r-1), m)=1$. In this paper, we study the associated inverse problems on $\mathsf d(G)$ and $\mathsf E(G)$. Our main results characterize the structure of any product-one free sequence with extremal length $\mathsf d(G)$, and that of any $|G|$-product-one free sequence with extremal length $\mathsf E(G)-1$.