Positivity of Dunkl's intertwining operator (Q1974932)

Associated with finite reflection groups are a family of first order differential-difference operators \(\{T_i\}\) known as Dunkl operators. The Dunkl operators in turn are associated with a set of degree preserving operators \(\{V_k\}\) satisfying the intertwining relation \(T_iV_k= V_k \partial_i\). The main achievement of the present work is to prove that when acting on positive polynomials with \(V_k\), positive polynomials result. This is done by using semi-group techniques to reduce the \(N\)-dimensional problem down to the one-dimensional case. One consequence of the positivity property is that the Dunkl kernel \(K(x,y)\) has the property that \(K(x,iy)\) is positive definite as a function of \(x\).