LAUSR

Abstract The aim of this article is to explore global and local properties of finite groups whose integral group rings have only trivial central units, so-called cut groups. For such a group, we study actions of Galois groups on its character table and show that the natural actions on the rows and columns are essentially the same; in particular, the number of rational-valued irreducible characters coincides with the number of rational-valued conjugacy classes. Further, we prove a natural criterion for nilpotent groups of class 2 to be cut and give a complete list of simple cut groups. Also, the impact of the cut property on Sylow 3-subgroups is discussed. We also collect substantial data on groups which indicates that the class of cut groups is surprisingly large. Several open problems are included.