Lecture series on Lie groups

Monday, 20 Feb at 4 pm

Tea: 3.50 pm

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Venue: A1-A2, CDEEP, Mathematics Department

Host: Dipendra Prasad

Speaker: M. S. Raghunathan

Affiliation: CEBS, Mumbai

Title: Compact Lie groups and their representations

Abstract: In this course I will first talk about the structure theory of compact Lie groups, beginning with the fact that a compact connected Lie group is an almost direct product of the identity-connected component of its centre and its commutator subgroup (which is closed subgroup) conjugacy of maximal tori and the fact that every element is contained in a maximal torus. In the course of proving these results, some results on the topology of compact Lie groups which will also be proved. I will then establish Weyl's theorem which asserts that if G is a compact connected Lie group and [G, G]=G, π_1(G,e) is finite (and hence the universal covering of a compact group whose abelianisation is trivial is compact.

Then I will introduce roots and weights and the Dynkin diagram of the compact group and sketch a proof of the fact that the Dynkin diagram determines the group locally. The remaining lectures will be devoted to representation theory. I will establish the bijective correspondence between 'Dominant Weights' and irreducible representations. The course will end with the Weyl Character Formula for the character of an irreducible representation corresponding to a 'dominant' weight. The entire theory is essentially the same as the representation theory of reductive algebraic groups. I will off and on indicate how the two are related.  

I will be assuming some familiarity with basic theory of Lie groups such as the correspondence between Lie sub-algebras of the Lie group and Lie subgroups of the Lie groups, also with some basic results from algebraic topology.