Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/ii/paper-3/19i/b/iii/solution

Work with the selected transitive orbit . By Maschke's theorem, decompose its permutation character as
where the are distinct nontrivial irreducible characters. Character orthogonality gives
Consequently the augmentation summand is irreducible exactly when this inner product equals .
The double cosets are the -orbits on . Because acts transitively on , these in turn correspond to the -orbits on : move the first coordinate to the base point , after which its stabilizer is . One orbit is the diagonal. There are exactly two orbits precisely when is transitive on , equivalently when the action is two-transitive. Part (ii) therefore proves
This is the irreducible augmentation criterion for a transitive group action.
Finally, transitivity implies that the fixed-vector space consists only of constant vectors and has dimension one. If the nonzero representation were a trivial representation, it would contribute another fixed vector, a contradiction. Thus is not the trivial representation.

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