Arun Ram
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Melbourne
Parkville, VIC 3010 Australia
aram@unimelb.edu.au
and
Department of Mathematics
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Madison, WI 53706 USA
ram@math.wisc.edu
Last updates: 20 June 2010
The groups
The semidirect product is the group of permutations with edges colored by elements of The product is the usual product on permutations with the convention that elements of slide along the edges and mutliply when they collide. The group is generated by the elements
and the subgroup consists of the elements The operation in the semidirect product in the group is determined by the product in and and for and
Let be an index set for the conjugacy classes of and let be a set of conjugacy class representatives. Let be the set of -multipartitions, tuples of partitions with components indexed by the elements of such that the total number of boxes in the mutlipartition is Then the elements are a set of conjugacy class representatives for The centraliser of in is with
Each element of is conjugate by elements of to a disjoint product of cycles of the form By conjugating this cycle by we have If denote the minimal indices of the cycles and are the numbers for the various cycles, then after conjugating by each cycle becomes where and If is the length of the last cycle, then conjugating the last cycle by gives If we conjugate the last cycle by we have In summary, any element of is conjugate to a product of disjoint cycles where each cycle is of the form except possibly the last cycle, which is of the form where is the length of the last cycle.
Let denote the centraliser of Since is a subgroup of for any element Suppose that is an element of which is a product of disjoint cycles of the form and that commutes with Conjugating by effects some combination of the following operations on the cycles of
permuting cycles of the same type, and with and
conjugating a single cycle by powers of itself, and
conjugating a single cycle by for any
Furthermore, the elements of which commute with are determined by how they "rearrange" the cycles of and a count (see [Mac, p170]) of the number of such operations shows that if and is the number of cycles of type for then
Let be an index set for the irreducible modules. If then let be an index set for a basis of so that for appropriater constants
Let be a -tuple of partitions with boxes in total. A standard tableau of shape is a filling of the boxes of with such that, in each partition
the rows increase from left to right,
the columns increase from top to bottom.
The rows and columns of each partition are numbered as for matrices and
is the box containing in
if is in position and
if is in
The numbers and are the content and the -type of the box respectively.
PICTURE
Use notations as in (???) and (???).
The irreducible representations of the group are indexed by the set of multipartitions with boxes in total.
The irreducible module with action given by where with
is the content of the box containing in
is the same as except that and are switched,
if is not standard.
Proof.
The following argument determining the simple modules is often called Clifford theory. Let be a simple module. Let be a simple submodule of Then is another simple submodule of and since the right hand side is an submodule of Let Thus Then where is a simple module. Since we are free to choose in its orbit we may assume that is of the form
where is a partition of An irreducible representation of is indexed by a tuple of partitions, one partition for each that appears in so that the total number of boxes in the tuple of partitions is
Let us make this construction more explicit. Using the notation in (???), the simple modules are indexed by the set and a simple module Then the action of on modules in (???) is given by defines an action of on the irreducible modules. The resulting action of on is given by Returning to the setup in question (???), (The fact that means that, in this case, the cocycles (factor sets) that appear in Clifford theory are trivial.)
The Casimir element is the sum of the elements in the conjugacy class of with notations as in (???).
The Casimir element for is a central element of the group algebra of such that
Let be an index set for the conjugacy classes of and let Let where the sum is over all elements of in the conjugacy class Then is an element of the center of the group algebra of and
Proof.
define an element of Then, as elements of and and thus, by Schur's lemma, where Thus Hence
Let and, for let Then and
Since ????????????????? acts on by the constant it follows that Part (b) of the theorem now follows by summing over
For example, if where in the last case indexes the rational representations of
Characters of
Let Then Let be an index set for the conjugacy classes of and, for each let and let so that is the product of power symmetric functions from each of the variable sets Define a "change of variables" from the variables, which are indexed by to variables indexed by by setting Define Then for and