1 Examples of Important Groups

1.1 Permutation Group

Consider a nite set X and a eld K. Then the set of functionals on X:
KX = {f : X K}
is a vector space under pointwise addition and scalar multiplication. It has basis:
KX =
x
|x X where
x
(y) =
xy
An action of a group G on X,denoted by induces a natural representation on KX given by:
: G GL(KX)
((g)f)(x) = f(g
1
x)
for all f KX and g G. To check this is a rep:
((e)f)(x) = f(e x) = f(x)
(gh)f)(x) = f(h
1
g
1
x) = ((h)f)(g
1
x) = (g)((h)f)(x)
Now we look at how each of the linear maps (g) given by the above representation act on the vector
space KX with the above basis: (g)
x
(y) =
x,g
1
y
=
gx,y
and therefore we get that:
(g)
x
=
gx
(1)
Characters of the permutation rep
For now we restrict attention to the eld of complex numbers although the following are true in a general
setting where we are dealing with a closed algebraic eld.
Let be the character of the representation (, CX) of a group G and let X = {x
1
, x
2
...x
n
}.Then with
respect to the basis
x
|x X, for any g G, (g) has the matrix form:
((g))
ij
=
gxj,xi
because the jth column is (g)
xj
=
gxj
.
Therefore by taking the trace of the above matrix form we obtain the character of the element g
of the group G.
(g) = Tr((g)) =

gxj,xj
But we also have that
gxj,xj
= 0 if and only if g x
j
= x
j
.This implies that the character of an element
g G is the number of xed points:
(g) = | {x X|g x = x} |
1
Decomposition in terms if Orbits
1.2 Cyclic Group
1.3 Symmetric Group
1.4 Dihedral Group
1.5 Quaternion Group
1.6 Heisenberg Group
1.7 The group: GL(F
q
)
1.8 Topological Group S
1
1.9 Topological Groups SU(2)
Denition and Structure of SU(2)
Abstract denition of the special unitary group:
SU(2) =
_
A GL
2
C|A

A = I
_
Or equivalently in matrix form:
SU(2) =
__
a b

b a
_
|a, b C|a|
2
+ |b|
2
= 1
_
(2)
Topologicaly we can therefore view SU(2) as S
3
C
2
R
4
. More formally we can dene space :
H = R SU(2) =
__
z w
w z
_
|w, z C
_
(3)
A
2
= detA denes a norm on H

= R
4
And hence we have thatSU(2) is the unit sphere in H
Conjugacy classes
Dene a subgroup of SU(2) called the maximal torus:
T =
__
a 0
0 a
1
_
|a C|a| = 1
_

= S
1
And also consider an element s =
_
0 1
1 0
_
SU(2). Hence by direct computation can verify that:
Lemma
i) t T we have sts
1
= t
1
ii) s
2
= I Z(SU(2)),that is the center of the group
iii) The normalizer of subgroup T in SU(2) is N
SU(2)
(T) = T sT
These can be veried directly by multiplying matrices.
Proposition
i) If O is a conjugacy class of SU(2) then t T such that t O. Moreover O T =
_
t, t
1
_
for some
t T.
ii) There is a bijection between the set of all conjugacy classes and the interval [1, 1], which is given by:
A
1
2
tr(A) where A is a representative matrix of each conjugacy class
Proof:
2
Representations
Let V
n
be the complex vector space of homogeneous polynomials in two variables.
V
n
=
_
f(x, y)|f(x, y) =

a
i
x
i
y
ni
for some complex numbers a
i
_
The dimension of this vector space is n + 1.
Note that SU(2) acts on V
n
as:

n
: SU(2) GL(V
n
) given by:

n
(A)f
_
x
y
_
= f(A
1
_
x
y
_
) A SU(2) and f V
n
This is a representation of SU(2) on the vector space V
n
, since given any A, B SU(2)

n
(A)(
n
(B)f(x, y))
First, compute the character of representation V
n
:
Lemma: A continuous class function f : SU(2) C is completely determined by its restriction to the
maximal torus T. Moreover f|
T
is even.
Lemma: If is a character of a rep of SU(2) then the character of the restricted rep |T is a Laurent
polynomial
From the above two lemmas we conclude that to completely determine the character of the reps V
n
we
need to know the character of its restriction to matrices of the form:
_
z 0
0 z
1
_
, which is a Laurent
polynomial.Moreover, the action on the basis of V
n
, x
i
y
j
is given by:

n
_
z 0
0 z
1
_
x
i
y
j
= (z
1
x)
i
(zy)
j
= z
ji
x
i
y
j
Hence the character of each representation V
n
is given by :

n
= (
n
_
z 0
0 z
1
_
) = z
n
+z
n1
+... +z
(n1)
+z
n
=
z
n+1
z
(n+1)
z z
1
(4)
Second, show that all representations V
n
are irreducible:
To prove this we need to show that if V
n
is a representation of SU(2) and W V
n
is an SU(2) invariant
subspace (non-zero), then W = V
n
.
To do this we shall rst show by induction the following claim: Claim
Third, the representations V
n
for n 0 are all irreducible representations of SU(2):
3