Representations of sl2, Part I

is a special Lie algebra, mentioned in my previous post briefly. It is the set of 2-by-2 matrices over of trace zero, with the Lie bracket defined by:

The representation theory of is important for several reasons.

1. It’s elegant.
2. It introduces important ideas that generalize to the setting of semisimple Lie algebras.
3. Knowing the theory for is useful in the proofs of the general theory, as it is often used as a tool there.

In this way, is an ideal example. Thus, I am posting this partially to help myself learn about Lie algebras.

Irreducibility

The notion of irreducibility parallels that in the theory of group representations:

Definition 1 Let be a Lie algebra. A -representation is irreducible if it contains no nontrivial subrepresentations, i.e. there is no , , such that “multiplication” by maps into itself.

Since we are working in an “artinian” category, we have, as a general fact:

Example 1 Every representation contains an irreducible representation. We prove this by induction on ; if this is trivial, since itself is irreducible. Suppose we know it for representations of smaller dimension than . If contains no subrepresentations, then we’re done. Otherwise, it contains such that , and contains an irreducible subrepresentation.

There is in fact an analog of Maschke’s theorem:

Theorem 2 (Weyl’s Theorem) Any (finite-dimensional) representation of decomposes uniquely (up to isomorphism) as a direct sum of irreducible representations.

Here this result is more difficult than Maschke’s theorem, but it can be proved more generally for semisimple Lie algebras, using either algebraic methods or the theory of compact groups. I shall therefore omit the proof, at least for now.

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A Presentation of

Now we want to classify the irreducible -modules. First, we need information on itself:

Choose the matrices (I’m following Fulton and Harris’s conventions)

There are three key relations:

The first two should be thought of in the following sense: There is a linear map sending . Then is an eigenvector with eigenvalue 2, and is an eigenvector with eigenvalue -2. is an eigenvector with value . This is the way these techniques generalize to semisimple Lie algebras, except that is replaced with a “Cartan subalgebra.”

There is another theorem I will quote without proof:

Theorem 3 In any (finite-dimensional) representation of , the map , is diagonalizable.

The result follows from general facts about the Jordan-Chevalley decomposition in semisimple Lie algebras. I’d rather prove it in the abstract setting though.

We’re just about ready to get to the classification theorem itself. But I’ll leave that for another post.

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