Unitary Representation - Complete Reducibility

Complete Reducibility

A unitary representation is completely reducible, in the sense that for any closed invariant subspace, the orthogonal complement is again a closed invariant subspace. This is at the level of an observation, but is a fundamental property. For example, it implies that finite dimensional unitary representations are always a direct sum of irreducible representations, in the algebraic sense.

Since unitary representations are much easier to handle than the general case, it is natural to consider unitarizable representations, those that become unitary on the introduction of a suitable complex Hilbert space structure. This works very well for finite groups, and more generally for compact groups, by an averaging argument applied to an arbitrary hermitian structure. For example, a natural proof of Maschke's theorem is by this route.