Real characters in nilpotent blocks

Abstract

We prove that the number of irreducible real characters in a nilpotent block of a finite group is locally determined. We further conjecture that the Frobenius-Schur indicators of those characters can be computed for p = 2 in terms of the extended defect group. We derive this from a more general conjecture on the Frobenius-Schur indicator of projective indecomposable characters of 2-blocks with one simple module. This extends results of Murray on 2-blocks with cyclic and dihedral defect groups.