Idempotents in representation rings of quivers. (Q1932497)

Let \(Q=(Q_0,Q_1)\) be an acyclic quiver. The authors solve the Clebsch-Gordan problem for the projective representations in \(Q\). More precisely the following fact is proved. Theorem 1. Let \(x,y,w\in Q_0\) and let \(P(x)\), \(P(y)\), \(P(w)\) be the corresponding projective representations of \(Q\). The multiplicity of \(P(w)\) in \(P(x)\otimes P(y)\) equals \[ n_{xw}n_{yw}-\sum_{z\to w}n_{xz}n_{yz}, \] where the sum is over all arrows with terminal vertex \(w\), and \(n_{ij}\) denotes the number of paths from \(i\) to \(j\) in \(Q\). The proof is technical and uses the properties of the representation ring \(R(Q)\) of \(Q\). In the paper the authors also investigate properties of \(R(Q)\). They define special category PIE of quivers over \(Q\) and show how to associate to any object \(x\in\text{PIE}\) an idempotent \(e_x\in R(Q)\). The following result is proved. Theorem 2. Let \(Q\) be an acyclic quiver. Then \(R(Q)\) has a direct product structure \[ R(Q)\cong\prod_{x\in\text{PIE}_0}\langle e_x\rangle, \] where \(\langle e_x\rangle\) is the principal ideal generated by \(e_x\).