Eigenfunction expansion associated with the Casimir operator on the quantum group \(SU_ q(1,1)\) (Q1913366)

The main purpose of this paper is to give the Plancherel formula for the quantum group \(\text{SU}_q (1,1)\) from the point of view of spectral analysis of the Casimir operator. In Section 3, the author constructs \(L^2 (\text{SU}_q (1,1))\) and realizes the Casimir operator as a symmetric operator on \(L^2 (\text{SU}_q (1,1))\). For this purpose, he introduces a certain nondegenerate sesquilinear form and some operator algebras, which is called the quantized Cartan decomposition. Using this idea, some difficulties in the previous works are avoided. And, the argument to the calculus of \(q\)-difference operators is reduced. In Section 4, the author discusses the selfadjointness of the Casimir operator. Section 5 is devoted to the construction of the Green operators for the \(q\)-difference operators which arise from the Casimir operator. In Sections 6 and 7, the author calculates the spectrum of the above \(q\)-difference operators and expresses the spectral projections corresponding to the point spectrum and corresponding to the continuous spectrum in terms of the basic hypergeometric functions. Finally in Section 8, the author gives the eigenfunction expansion theorem for the Casimir operator, which corresponds to the Plancherel formula for \(\text{SU}_q (1,1)\). As a consequence, it is shown that there exist three kinds of series: the principal continuous series, the discrete series and the strange series as closed subspaces of \(L^2 (\text{SU}_q (1,1))\).