AUTOMORPHISM GROUPS OF SCHUR RINGS

In 1993, Muzychuk [23] showed that the rational Schur rings over a cyclic group Z(n) are in one-to-one correspondence with sublattices of the divisor lattice of n, or equivalently, with sublattices of the lattice of subgroups of Zn. This can easily be extended to show that for any finite group G, sublattices of the lattice of characteristic subgroups of G give rise to rational Schur rings over G in a natural way. Our main result is that any finite group may be represented as the (algebraic) automorphism group of such a rational Schur ring over an abelian p-group, for any odd prime p. In contrast, over a cyclic group the automorphism group of any Schur ring is abelian. We also prove a converse to the well-known result of Muzychuk [24] that two Schur rings over a cyclic group are isomorphic if and only if they coincide; namely, we show that over a group which is not cyclic, there always exist distinct isomorphic Schur rings.