On the functional graph of the power map over finite groups

Abstract

In this paper we study the description of the digraph associated with the power map over finite groups. Our main motivation comes from the nice description of such digraphs in the case of cyclic groups. In particular, we derive results on abelian groups, and also on flower groups, which are introduced in this paper. The class of flower groups includes many non abelian groups such as dihedral and generalized quaternion groups, and the projective general linear group of order two over a finite field. In particular, we provide improvements on past works.