Periodic linear groups in which permutability is a transitive relation

A PT -group is a group in which the relation of being a permutable subgroup is transitive. The main aim of this paper is to show that a (homomorphic image of a) periodic linear group is a soluble PT-group if and only if each subgroup of a Sylow subgroup is permutable in the corresponding Sylow normalizer (see Theorem 4.7); for a fixed prime p, the latter condition is denoted by Xp . In order to prove our main theorem, we need (i) to characterize (homomorphic images of) periodic linear groups that are PT-groups (see Sect. 2), (ii) to develop a fusion theory for locally finite groups (see Sect. 3), (iii) to carefully study (homomorphic images of) periodic linear groups with the property Xp for a fixed prime p (see for instance Theorem 4.6). As a by-product we obtain (among other results) a characterization of (homomorphic images of) periodic linear Xp -groups in terms of pronormality (see Theorem 4.11) that will allow us to show that, on some occasions, the property Xp is inherited by subgroups.