Character theory

In mathematics, more specifically in group theory, the character of a group representation is a function on the group that associates to each group element the trace of the corresponding matrix. The character carries the essential information about the representation in a more condensed form. Georg Frobenius initially developed representation theory of finite groups entirely based on the characters, and without any explicit matrix realization of representations themselves. This is possible because a complex representation of a finite group is determined (up to isomorphism) by its character. The situation with representations over a field of positive characteristic, so-called "modular representations", is more delicate, but Richard Brauer developed a powerful theory of characters in this case as well. Many deep theorems on the structure of finite groups use characters of modular representations.

Applications

Characters of irreducible representations encode many important properties of a group and can thus be used to study its structure. Character theory is an essential tool in the classification of finite simple groups. Close to half of the proof of the Feit–Thompson theorem involves intricate calculations with character values. Easier, but still essential, results that use character theory include the Burnside theorem (a purely group-theoretic proof of the Burnside theorem has since been found, but that proof came over half a century after Burnside's original proof), and a theorem of Richard Brauer and Michio Suzuki stating that a finite simple group cannot have a generalized quaternion group as its Sylow 2-subgroup.

Definitions

Let V be a finite-dimensional vector space over a field F and let ρ : G → GL(V) be a representation of a group G on V. The character of ρ is the function χρ : GF given by

where Tr is the trace.

A character χρ is called irreducible or simple if ρ is an irreducible representation. The degree of the character χ is the dimension of ρ; in characteristic zero this is equal to the value χ(1). A character of degree 1 is called linear. When G is finite and F has characteristic zero, the kernel of the character χρ is the normal subgroup:

which is precisely the kernel of the representation ρ.

Properties

is an algebraic integer for all x in G.

Arithmetic properties

Let ρ and σ be representations of G. Then the following identities hold:

where ρσ is the direct sum, ρσ is the tensor product, ρ denotes the conjugate transpose of ρ, and Alt2 is the alternating product Alt2 ρ = ρρ and Sym2 is the symmetric square, which is determined by

.

Character tables

The irreducible complex characters of a finite group form a character table which encodes much useful information about the group G in a compact form. Each row is labelled by an irreducible representation and the entries in the row are the characters of the representation on the respective conjugacy class of G. The columns are labelled by (representatives of) the conjugacy classes of G. It is customary to label the first row by the trivial character, and the first column by (the conjugacy class of) the identity. The entries of the first column are the values of the irreducible characters at the identity, the degree of the irreducible characters. Characters of degree 1 are known as linear characters.

Here is the character table of

the cyclic group with three elements and generator u:

  (1) (u) (u2)
1 1 1 1
χ1 1 ω ω2
χ2 1 ω2 ω

where ω is a primitive third root of unity.

The character table is always square, because the number of irreducible representations is equal to the number of conjugacy classes.[1] The first row of the character table always consists of 1s, and corresponds to the trivial representation (the 1-dimensional representation consisting of 1 × 1 matrices containing the entry 1).

Orthogonality relations

The space of complex-valued class functions of a finite group G has a natural inner-product:

where β(g) is the complex conjugate of β(g). With respect to this inner product, the irreducible characters form an orthonormal basis for the space of class-functions, and this yields the orthogonality relation for the rows of the character table:

For g, h in G the orthogonality relation for columns is as follows:

where the sum is over all of the irreducible characters χi of G and the symbol |CG(g)| denotes the order of the centralizer of g.

The orthogonality relations can aid many computations including:

Character table properties

Certain properties of the group G can be deduced from its character table:

The character table does not in general determine the group up to isomorphism: for example, the quaternion group Q and the dihedral group of 8 elements, D4, have the same character table. Brauer asked whether the character table, together with the knowledge of how the powers of elements of its conjugacy classes are distributed, determines a finite group up to isomorphism. In 1964, this was answered in the negative by E. C. Dade.

The linear characters form a character group, which has important number theoretic connections.

Induced characters and Frobenius reciprocity

The characters discussed in this section are assumed to be complex-valued. Let H be a subgroup of the finite group G. Given a character χ of G, let χH denote its restriction to H. Let θ be a character of H. Ferdinand Georg Frobenius showed how to construct a character of G from θ, using what is now known as Frobenius reciprocity. Since the irreducible characters of G form an orthonormal basis for the space of complex-valued class functions of G, there is a unique class function θG of G with the property that

for each irreducible character χ of G (the leftmost inner product is for class functions of G and the rightmost inner product is for class functions of H). Since the restriction of a character of G to the subgroup H is again a character of H, this definition makes it clear that θG is a non-negative integer combination of irreducible characters of G, so is indeed a character of G. It is known as the character of G induced from θ. The defining formula of Frobenius reciprocity can be extended to general complex-valued class functions.

Given a matrix representation ρ of H, Frobenius later gave an explicit way to construct a matrix representation of G, known as the representation induced from ρ, and written analogously as ρG. This led to an alternative description of the induced character θG. This induced character vanishes on all elements of G which are not conjugate to any element of H. Since the induced character is a class function of G, it is only now necessary to describe its values on elements of H. If one writes G as a disjoint union of right cosets of H, say

then, given an element h of H, we have:

Because θ is a class function of H, this value does not depend on the particular choice of coset representatives.

This alternative description of the induced character sometimes allows explicit computation from relatively little information about the embedding of H in G, and is often useful for calculation of particular character tables. When θ is the trivial character of H, the induced character obtained is known as the permutation character of G (on the cosets of H).

The general technique of character induction and later refinements found numerous applications in finite group theory and elsewhere in mathematics, in the hands of mathematicians such as Emil Artin, Richard Brauer, Walter Feit and Michio Suzuki, as well as Frobenius himself.

Mackey decomposition

Mackey decomposition was defined and explored by George Mackey in the context of Lie groups, but is a powerful tool in the character theory and representation theory of finite groups. Its basic form concerns the way a character (or module) induced from a subgroup H of a finite group G behaves on restriction back to a (possibly different) subgroup K of G, and makes use of the decomposition of G into (H, K)-double cosets.

If

is a disjoint union, and θ is a complex class function of H, then Mackey's formula states that

where θt is the class function of t−1Ht defined by θt(t−1ht) = θ(h) for all h in H. There is a similar formula for the restriction of an induced module to a subgroup, which holds for representations over any ring, and has applications in a wide variety of algebraic and topological contexts.

Mackey decomposition, in conjunction with Frobenius reciprocity, yields a well-known and useful formula for the inner product of two class functions θ and ψ induced from respective subgroups H and K, whose utility lies in the fact that it only depends on how conjugates of H and K intersect each other. The formula (with its derivation) is:

(where T is a full set of (H, K)-double coset representatives, as before). This formula is often used when θ and ψ are linear characters, in which case all the inner products appearing in the right hand sum are either 1 or 0, depending on whether or not the linear characters θt and ψ have the same restriction to t−1HtK. If θ and ψ are both trivial characters, then the inner product simplifies to |T|.

"Twisted" dimension

One may interpret the character of a representation as the "twisted" dimension of a vector space.[2] Treating the character as a function of the elements of the group χ(g), its value at the identity is the dimension of the space, since χ(1) = Tr(ρ(1)) = Tr(IV) = dim(V). Accordingly, one can view the other values of the character as "twisted" dimensions.

One can find analogs or generalizations of statements about dimensions to statements about characters or representations. A sophisticated example of this occurs in the theory of monstrous moonshine: the j-invariant is the graded dimension of an infinite-dimensional graded representation of the Monster group, and replacing the dimension with the character gives the McKay–Thompson series for each element of the Monster group.[2]

Characters of Lie groups and Lie algebras

Let G be a Lie group with associated Lie algebra , and let H (resp. ) be the Cartan subgroup (resp. Cartan subalgebra).

Let V be a representation of G. If we write the weight spaces of V as Vλ, then we can define the formal character of the Lie group and Lie algebra as

where we sum over all weights of the weight lattice. In the above expression, eλ is a formal object satisfying eλeμ = eλ+μ. This formal character is related to the regular one for other groups. If eXH, where H is the Cartan subgroup of G (that is, X belongs to ), then

The above discussion for the decomposition of tensor products and other representations continue to hold true for the formal character. In the case of a compact Lie group, the Weyl character formula can be used to calculate the formal character.

See also

References

  1. Serre, §2.5
  2. 1 2 (Gannon 2006)
  • Lecture 2 of Fulton, William; Harris, Joe (1991). Representation theory. A first course. Graduate Texts in Mathematics, Readings in Mathematics. 129. New York: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-97495-8. MR 1153249.  online
  • Isaacs, I.M. (1994). Character Theory of Finite Groups (Corrected reprint of the 1976 original, published by Academic Press. ed.). Dover. ISBN 0-486-68014-2. 
  • Gannon, Terry (2006). Moonshine beyond the Monster: The Bridge Connecting Algebra, Modular Forms and Physics. ISBN 0-521-83531-3. 
  • James, Gordon; Liebeck, Martin (2001). Representations and Characters of Groups (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00392-X. 
  • Serre, Jean-Pierre (1977). Linear Representations of Finite Groups. Graduate Texts in Mathematics. 42. Translated from the second French edition by Leonard L. Scott. New York-Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-90190-6. MR 0450380. doi:10.1007/978-1-4684-9458-7. 
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