Young-diagrammatic methods for the representation theory of the classical groups of type \(B_ n\), \(C_ n\), \(D_ n\) (Q1090770)

It is desirable to express the representation theory of the classical groups in a purely combinatorial way, namely only in terms of Young diagrams. This goal has already been reached in the case of the general linear groups GL(n). The characters of GL(n) can be expressed in terms of Littlewood-Richardson coefficients and the Kostka coefficients. These two coefficients can be stated using only Young diagrams independently of the rank n of GL(n). The present paper generalizes these results to the other classical groups over \({\mathbb{C}}\). The authors give explicit formulas to decompose the tensor product of two irreducible representations into irreducible constituents. They also obtain a duality relation between the representations of the symplectic group Sp and the orthogonal group SO by linking the irreducible characters of Sp and SO. Note the relation between this paper and the work of Littlewood and King. \textit{D. E. Littlewood} had shown the key lemma of this paper and for classical groups of sufficiently large ranks, he had illustrated with examples the algorithm to calculate the decompositions of tensor products [The theory of group characters and matrix representations of groups (1950; Zbl 0038.165)]. On the other hand, \textit{R. C. King} had presented algorithms similar to the authors' concerning the specialization homomorphisms and his results are also similar to the authors' [J. Math. Phys. 12, 1588-1598 (1971; Zbl 0239.20061); J. Phys. A 8, 429-449 (1975; Zbl 0301.20029)]. But the authors make several points of improvement on the formulations and proofs of King.