Skew braces from Rota–Baxter operators: a cohomological characterisation and some examples

Rota–Baxter operators for groups were recently introduced by Guo, Lang, and Sheng. Bardakov and Gubarev showed that with each Rota–Baxter operator, one can associate a skew brace. Skew braces on a group G can be characterised in terms of certain gamma functions from G to its automorphism group Aut (G) that are defined by a functional equation. For the skew braces obtained from a Rota–Baxter operator, the corresponding gamma functions take values in the inner automorphism group Inn (G) of G. In this paper, we give a characterisation of the gamma functions on a group G, with values in Inn (G), that come from a Rota–Baxter operator, in terms of the vanishing of a certain element in a suitable second cohomology group. Exploiting this characterisation, we are able to exhibit examples of skew braces whose corresponding gamma functions take values in the inner automorphism group, but cannot be obtained from a Rota–Baxter operator. For gamma functions that can be obtained from a Rota–Baxter operators, we show how to get the latter from the former, exploiting the knowledge that a suitable central group extension splits.