Reductive Dual Pair - Structure Theory and Classification

Structure Theory and Classification

The notion of a reductive dual pair makes sense over any field F, which we assume to be fixed throughout. Thus W is a symplectic vector space over F.

If W₁ and W₂ are two symplectic vector spaces and (G₁, G′₁), (G₂, G′₂) are two reductive dual pairs in the corresponding symplectic groups, then we may form a new symplectic vector space W = W₁ ⊕ W₂ and a pair of groups G = G₁ × G₂, G′ = G′₁ × G′,₂ acting on W by isometries. It turns out that (G, G′) is a reductive dual pair. A reductive dual pair is called reducible if it can be obtained in this fashion from smaller groups, and irreducible otherwise. A reducible pair can be decomposed into a direct product of irreducible ones, and for many purposes, it is enough to restrict one's attention to the irreducible case.

Several classes of reductive dual pairs had appeared earlier in the work of André Weil. Roger Howe proved a classification theorem, which states that in the irreducible case, those pairs exhaust all possibilities. An irreducible reductive dual pair (G, G′) in Sp(W) is said to be of type II if there is a lagrangian subspace X in W that is invariant under both G and G′, and of type I otherwise.

An archetypical irreducible reductive dual pair of type II consists of a pair of general linear groups and arises as follows. Let U and V be two vector spaces over F, X = U ⊗_F V be their tensor product, and Y = Hom_F(X, F) its dual. Then the direct sum W = X ⊕ Y can be endowed with a symplectic form such that X and Y are lagrangian subspaces, and the restriction of the symplectic form to X × Y ⊂ W × W coincides with the pairing between the vector space X and its dual Y. If G = GL(U) and G′ = GL(V), then both these groups act linearly on X and Y, the actions preserve the symplectic form on W, and (G, G′) is an irreducible reductive dual pair. Note that X is an invariant lagrangian subspace, hence this dual pair is of type II.

An archetypical irreducible reductive dual pair of type I consists of an orthogonal group and a symplectic group and is constructed analogously. Let U be an orthogonal vector space and V be a symplectic vector space over F, and W = U ⊗_F V be their tensor product. The key observation is that W is a symplectic vector space whose bilinear form is obtained from the product of the forms on the tensor factors. Moreover, if G = O(U) and G′ = Sp(V) are the isometry groups of U and V, then they act on W in a natural way, these actions are symplectic, and (G, G′) is an irreducible reductive dual pair of type I.

These two constructions produce all irreducible reductive dual pairs over an algebraically closed field F, such as the field C of complex numbers. In general, one can replace vector spaces over F by vector spaces over a division algebra D over F, and proceed similarly to above to construct an irreducible reductive dual pair of type II. For type I, one starts with a division algebra D with involution τ, a hermitian form on U, and a skew-hermitian form on V (both of them non-degenerate), and forms their tensor product over D, W = U ⊗_D V. Then W is naturally endowed with a structure of a symplectic vector space over F, the isometry groups of U and V act symplectically on W and form an irreducible reductive dual pair of type I. Roger Howe proved that, up to an isomorphism, any irreducible dual pair arises in this fashion. An explicit list for the case F = R appears in Howe (1989b).