Harmonic analysis on the affine group of the plane (Q6103437)

The authors consider the decomposition of the left-regular representation of the group \(G_n\) of affine transformations of Euclidean \(n\)-dimensional space, given by the semidirect product of \(\mathbb{R}^n\) and \(GL_n(\mathbb{R})\). First, the authors prove that the left-regular representation of \(G_n\) is equivalent to a (countably) infinite multiple of a single square-integrable irreducible representation \(\sigma\) (Theorem~4.8). In other words, that \(G_n\) is an [AR]-group, a group where the left-regular representation decomposes as a direct product of irreducible ones. In general, aside from the case \(n=1\), giving an explicit realization on a particular Hilbert space of the irreducible representation \(\sigma\) in the theorem is difficult since the proof of the theorem above is based on a series of transformations between the spaces \(L^2(G_n)\) and \(L^2(\mathcal{O}_n \times GL_n(\mathbb{R}))\) with \(\mathcal{O}_n = \mathbb{R}^n \setminus \{\mathbf{0}\}\), along with operations of tensoring, direct products and induction of representations. The main result of this paper is the explicit description of the square-integrable irreducible representation for the case of \(G_2\). In particular, the authors explicitly describe the action of the representation \(\sigma\) (given in equation (23)) on the Hilbert space \(L^2(K,L^2(\mathbb{R}^*))\) of \(L^2(\mathbb{R}^*)\)-valued weakly measurable functions on \(K\), where \(K =[\mathbf{0},K_0]\) is a closed subgroup of \(G_2\) (associated to a closed subgroup \(K_0\) of \(GL_2(\mathbb{R})\)). With an explicit homemorphism \(\gamma : \mathcal{O}_2 \to K_0\), the action of the representation \(\sigma\) is given a.e. for \(t \in \mathbb{R}^*\) by \[ \left( \sigma(x,A)F[\mathbf{0},\gamma(\omega)] \right)(t) = \frac{ |\det(A)|^{\frac12}| \|\omega\|}{\| \omega A\|} e^{2 \pi i (\omega x + t^{-1} u_{\omega,A})}(F[\mathbf{0}, \gamma(\omega A)])(v_{\omega,A}^{-1} t) \] for \(F \in L^2(K,L^2(\mathbb{R}^*)) \), \(\omega \in \mathcal{O}_2\) and \([x,A] \in G_2\). The notations are detailed in Section~5. The proof that the irreducible representation \(\sigma\) is square-integrable and that it gives the desired decomposition of the left-regular representation is given in Section~6. As an application, in Section~7, the authors give an explicit form of the Plancherel formula for \(G_2\). In addition, the paper contains an extensive introduction to the representation theory and Fourier analysis needed for the main results, making the paper self-contained and accessible to a large audience.