Geometric analysis on small unitary representations of \(\text{GL}(N, \mathbb R)\) (Q630780)

In general, it is very hard to have a complete spectral decomposition of an irreducible unitary representation of a real reductive group, when restricted to a symmetric subgroup. In the paper under review, the authors achieve such decompositions for a family of small unitary representations of the general linear group \(\text{GL}(N,\mathbb R)\), when restricted to all symmetric subgroups. This is a nice result of representation theory, and is also interesting from the point of view of geometric analysis. To be more precise, for every purely imaginary number \(i\lambda\), and every \(\delta\in \mathbb Z/2\mathbb Z\), denote by \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}\) the normalized parabolic induction \(\text{Ind}_{(\mathbb R^\times \times \text{GL}(N-1,\mathbb R))\ltimes\mathbb R^{N-1}}^{\text{GL}(N,\mathbb R)}\chi_{i\lambda,\delta}\otimes 1\otimes 1\), where \(\chi_{i\lambda,\delta}\) is the character \(a\mapsto |a|^{i\lambda}\operatorname{sign}(a)^\delta\) of \(\mathbb R^\times\). This is an irreducible unitary representation of \(\text{GL}(N,\mathbb R)\) of minimal Gelfand-Kirillov dimension. The authors obtain explicit decompositions of \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{\text{Sp}(2n,\mathbb R)}\), \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{\text{GL}(n,\mathbb C)}\) (when \(N=2n\) is even), \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{\text{GL}(p,\mathbb R)\times \text{GL}(q,\mathbb R)}\) and \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{O(p,q)}\) (\(p,q>0\), \(p+q=N\)). In particular, they show that \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{\text{Sp}(2n,\mathbb R)}\) is either irreducible or the direct sum of two irreducible subrepresentations; \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{\text{GL}(n,\mathbb C)}\) is a countable sum of irreducible unitary representations; \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{\text{GL}(p,\mathbb R)\times \text{GL}(q,\mathbb R)}\) contains only a continuous spectrum, and \(\pi_{i\lambda, \delta}|_{O(p,q)}\) contains both a discrete and a continuous spectrum.