Symmetry breaking operators for strongly spherical reductive pairs (Q6057852)

Summary: A real reductive pair \((G, H)\) is called strongly spherical if the homogeneous space \((G \times H)/\operatorname{diag}(H)\) is real spherical. This geometric condition is equivalent to the representation-theoretic property that \(\dim \operatorname{Hom}_H (\pi|_H, \tau) < \infty\) for all smooth admissible representations \(\pi\) of \(G\) and \(\tau\) of \(H\). In this paper we explicitly construct for all strongly spherical pairs \((G, H)\) intertwining operators in \(\operatorname{Hom}_H (\pi|_H, \tau)\) for \(\pi\) and \(\tau\) spherical principal series representations of \(G\) and \(H\). These so-called \textit{symmetry breaking operators} depend holomorphically on the induction parameters and we further show that they generically span the space \(\operatorname{Hom}_H (\pi|_H, \tau)\). In the special case of multiplicity one pairs we extend our construction to vector-valued principal series representations and obtain generic formulas for the multiplicities between arbitrary principal series. As an application, we prove an early version of the Gross-Prasad conjecture for complex orthogonal groups, and also provide lower bounds for the dimension of the space of Shintani functions.