Spectral theory of commuting self-adjoint partial differential operators (Q1106453)

An open subset \(\Omega\) of a locally compact group G is said to have the integrability property if there exists a strongly continuous unitary representation U of G on \(L^ 2(G)\) such that for each \(x\in \Omega\) U is expressed as \((U(t)f)(y)=f(y+t)\) for (y,t)\(\in \Omega \times G\) near (x,0) and any \(f\in L^ 2(G).\) For a measurable subset \(\Omega\) of a locally compact abelian group G and a regular positive Borel measure \(\mu\) of the dual group \(\hat G\) of G, (\(\Omega\),\(\mu)\) is called a spectral pair if the Fourier transform is an isometry from \(L^ 1(G)\cap L^ 2(G)\subset L^ 2(G)\) to \(L^ 2(\mu)\) and has a dense range. \(\Omega\) is called a spectral set if there exists a measure \(\mu\) on G such that (\(\Omega\),\(\mu)\) is a spectral pair. It is shown that if \(G=R^ n\) \(\Omega\) has the integrability property iff there exists commuting self-adjoint operators \(H_ 1,...,H_ n\) in \(L^ 2(G)\) such that each \(H_ j\) equals the partial derivative \(- i\partial /\partial x_ j\) in \(C_ c^{\infty}(\Omega)\), and that \(\Omega\) has the integrability property iff \(\Omega\) is a spectral set. For a general locally compact abelian group G let (\(\Omega\),\(\mu)\) be a spectral pair with associated unitary representation U. The author shows that supp \(\mu\) is a subgroup of \(\hat G\) iff U acts multiplicatively.