I talked about the Lie algebra a while back. Now I’m going to do it more properly, and using the tools developed. This is going to feature prominently in some of the proofs in the sequel.
Now, let’s see how all this works for the familiar case of , with its usual generators
. This is a simple Lie algebra in fact. To see this, let’s consider the ideal
of
generated by some nonzero vector
; I claim it is all of
.
Consider the three cases :
First, assume or
is nonzero. Bracketing with
, and again, gives
Using a vanderMonde invertibility of this system of linear equations, we find that either or
belongs to
. Say
does, for definiteness; then
too; from this,
as well. Thus
.
If , then from
, we find
, which implies
and similarly for
. Thus
.
I claim now that the algebra is in fact a Cartan subalgebra. Indeed, it is easily checked to be maximal abelian. Moreover, since
acts by a diagonalizable operator on the faithful representation on
, it follows that
is (abstractly) semisimple.
So given a finite-dimensional representation of , we have
where is the
-eigenspace for
, and
ranges over the complex numbers! We are now interested in looking at finite-dimensional irreducible representations
. In particular,
will have a highest weight
, which in this case is just a largest eigenvalue, and a corresponding eigenvector
. Then
,
.
Proposition 1
, and the lowest weight in
is
.
To see this, we shall prove three commutation relations on , the enveloping algebra.
The first two follow because (resp.
) and bracketing by
is a derivation on the algebra
.
The third follows by a somewhat tedious inductive argument. It is obvious for . Assume it for
. Consider
because bracketing is a derivation. Now simplifying this using the inductive hypothesis yields:
Simplifying futher gives:
So, if we define , then we see that
satisfies the recurrence relation
which is also satisfied by the other term at the end of the third identity.
Now, we can prove the proposition. As above, was the highest weight and
a vector with weight
. Then by the Poincare-Birkhoff-Witt basis theorem, the family
is a basis. Therefore since is annihilated by
,
spans a sub--module of
, which is all of
by simplicity. Note that
is a weight vector of weight
; for large
it follows that
.
Let be the largest value such that
. I claim now that
.
First of all, we have
Now, in view of the third identity:
and since , it follows that
In particular, is a positive integer and
!
February 4, 2010 at 7:19 pm
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