Automorphic word maps and the Amit–Ashurst conjecture

Abstract

In this article, we address the Amit–Ashurst conjecture on lower bounds of a probability distribution associated to a word on a finite nilpotent group. We obtain an extension of a result of [R. D. Camina, A. Iñiguez and A. Thillaisundaram, Word problems for finite nilpotent groups, Arch. Math. (Basel) 115 (2020), 6, 599–609] by providing improved bounds for the case of finite nilpotent groups of class 2 for words in an arbitrary number of variables, and also settle the conjecture in some cases. We achieve this by obtaining words that are identically distributed on a group to a given word. In doing so, we also obtain an improvement of a result of [A. Iñiguez and J. Sangroniz, Words and characters in finite 𝑝-groups, J. Algebra 485 (2017), 230–246] using elementary techniques.