Conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups and nilpotence class of $p$-groups

Abstract: In this paper, we set $\eta (G)$ to be the number of conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups of $G$. We prove that if $G$ is a $p$-group of order $p^n$ and nilpotence class $l$, then $\eta (G)$ is bounded below by a linear function in $n/l$.