Twisted Exponents and Twisted Frobenius-Schur Indicators for Hopf Algebras

Classically, the exponent of a group is the least common multiple of the orders of its elements. This notion was generalized by Etingof and Gelaki to the context of Hopf algebras. Kashina, Sommerhauser and Zhu later observed that there is a strong connection between exponents and Frobenius-Schur indicators. In this paper, we introduce the notion of twisted exponents and show that there is a similar relationship between the twisted exponent and the twisted Frobenius-Schur indicators defined in previous work of the authors. In particular, we exhibit a new formula for the twisted Frobenius-Schur indicators and use it to prove periodicity and rationality statements for the twisted indicators.