The representation ring of a compact Lie group revisited (Q1266439)

The author describes a construction of the induction homomorphism for representation rings of compact Lie groups. He obtains in a new way the results from \textit{G. Segal}'s paper [Publ. Math., Inst. Hautes Étud. Sci. 34, 113-128 (1968; Zbl 0209.06203)]. First he shows that a class function on a compact Lie group \(G\) is a character if its restrictions to all finite subgroups are characters. If \(H\subseteq G\) is a pair of compact Lie groups, then the induction homomorphisms \(\text{Cl}(H)\rightarrow \text{Cl} (G)\) are defined for class functions and it is shown that these induction homomorphisms send characters to characters (hence define induction maps between representation rings). In the third section the author presents a description of the cokernel of the restriction homomorphism \(rs_G\). This restriction homomorphism is onto whenever \(G\) is finite or \(\pi _0(G)\) is a \(p-\)group. The author presents several other sufficient conditions under which this homomorphism is surjective. Most of the results are true for real as well as complex representations.