Conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups of metacyclic $p$-groups

Abstract: In this paper, we set $\eta (G)$ to be the number of conjugacy classes of maximal cyclic subgroups of a finite group $G$. We compute $\eta (G)$ for all metacyclic $p$-groups. We show that if $G$ is a metacyclic $p$-group of order $p^n$ that is not dihedral, generalized quaternion, or semi-dihedral, then $\eta (G) \ge n-2$, and we determine when equality holds.