Representations of currents taking values in a totally disconnected group (Q434427)

Irreducible representations of the group of bounded measurable currents of the automorphism group of a homogeneous tree of finite degree are determined. The group of bounded measurable currents is the completion of the group of step functions on a compact set with respect to a suitable metric. Let one vertex of the tree be fixed. The subgroup of all automorphisms that fix this vertex is a maximal compact subgroup. An irreducible unitary representation is called spherical if it has a non-zero invariant vector under this maximal compact subgroup. Spherical representations of the automorphism group can be defined depending on a complex parameter. If this parameter value is in the open unit interval, the corresponding representation can be unitarized and defines a so-called complementary spherical representation. Irreducible representations of the group of bounded measurable currents are constructed in the following way. It is shown that the inner tensor product of finitely many complementary spherical representations of parameters less than \(1/2\) whose sum is less than \(1/2\) can be split into a direct sum of a complementary spherical representation to the parameter corresponding to this sum and a representation which can be decomposed into representations of the so-called principal or discrete series. This implies that the representation space corresponding to a parameter less than \(1/2\) can be isometrically embedded into any tensor product of the representation spaces corresponding to parameters that sum up to this value and this isometric embedding commutes with the action of the automorphism group. Given a normalized Radon measure without atoms on a compact metric space in this way the representations can be extended from the automorphism group to the group of step functions from this measure space to the automorphism group. A step function is mapped to the tensor product of complementary spherical representation with parameters corresponding to the measures of the sets where it is constant. It is shown that this representation is irreducible. Then, the representation is extended to the group of bounded measurable currents.