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We propose and present evidence for a conjectural global-local phenomenon concerning the $p$-rationality of $p$-height-zero characters. Specifically, if $\chi$ is a height-zero character of a finite group $G$ and $D$ is a defect group of the $p$-block of $G$ containing $\chi$, then the $p$-rationality of $\chi$ can be captured inside the normalizer $N_G(D)$.

Let $H$ be a nonabelian finite simple group. Huppert's conjecture asserts that if $G$ is a finite group with the same set of complex character degrees as $H$, then $G\cong H\times A$ for some abelian group $A$. Over the past two decades, several specific cases of this conjecture have been addressed. Recently, attention has shifted to the analogous conjecture for character codegrees: if $G$ has the same set of character codegrees as $H$, then $G\cong H$. Unfortunately, both problems have primarily been examined on a case-by-case basis. In this paper and the companion [HM22], we present a more unified approach to the codegree conjecture and confirm it for several families of simple groups.

We study the zero-sharing behavior among irreducible characters of a finite group. For symmetric groups $S_n$, it is proved that, with one exception, any two irreducible characters have at least one common zero. To further explore this phenomenon, we introduce the common-zero graph of a finite group $G$, with non-linear irreducible characters of $G$ as vertices, and edges connecting characters that vanish on some common group element. We show that for solvable and simple groups, the number of connected components of this graph is bounded above by 3. Lastly, the result for $S_n$ is applied to prove the non-equivalence of the metrics on permutations induced from faithful irreducible characters of the group.

We classify Sylow $p$-subgroups of finite groups whose principal $p$-blocks have precisely six ordinary irreducible characters., Comment: 18 pages, 1 table. The second version includes comments from Gunter Malle

We study the codegree isomorphism problem for finite simple groups. In particular, we show that such a group is determined by the codegrees (counting multiplicity) of its irreducible characters. The proof is uniform for all simple groups and only depends on the classification by means of Artin-Tits' simple order theorem., Comment: 24 pages, 2 tables

Let $p$ be a prime and $G$ a finite group. We propose a strong bound for the number of $p'$-degree irreducible characters of $G$ in terms of the commutator factor group of a Sylow $p$-subgroup of $G$. The bound arises from a recent conjecture of Navarro and Tiep [NT21] on fields of character values and a phenomenon called the continuity of $p$-rationality level of $p'$-degree characters. This continuity property in turn is predicted by the celebrated McKay-Navarro conjecture [Nav04]. We achieve both the bound and the continuity property for $p=2$., Comment: 22 pages. To appear in TAMS