On soluble subgroups of sporadic groups

Abstract: Let $G$ be an almost simple sporadic group and let $H$ be a soluble subgroup of $G$. In this paper we prove that there exists $x,y \in G$ such that $H \cap H^x \cap H^y=1$, which is equivalent to the bound $b(G,H) \leqslant 3$ with respect to the base size of $G$ on the set of cosets of $H$. This bound is best possible. In this setting, our main result establishes a strong form of a more general conjecture of Vdovin on the intersection of conjugate soluble subgroups of finite groups. The proof uses a combination of computational and probabilistic methods.