Gelfand pairs attached to representations of compact Lie groups (Q5927626)

The author constructs, for each Lie algebra \({\mathbf g}\) and each real representation \(V\) of \({\mathbf g}\), a two-step nilpotent Lie group \(N({\mathbf g},V)\) endowed with a natural left-invariant metric. The class of these spaces coincides with that of all naturally reductive spaces among all homogeneous nil-manifolds. A homogeneous Riemannian manifold \((M,g)\) is said to be commutative if the algebra of all \(I(M)^0\)-invariant differential operators is commutative. The commutative spaces are strongly connected with the so-called Gelfand pairs. The author introduces a weaker notion of an almost-commutative space, which is obtained by a ``localization procedure''. The author first classifies all those Lie groups \(N({\mathbf g},V)\) which are almost-commutative. As an application, he explicitly classifies those \(N({\mathbf g},V)\) which are commutative spaces. He also concludes that all the resulting spaces are weakly commutative in the sense of A. Selberg.