Harmonic analysis on GL_n over finite fields

DOI10.4310/PAMQ.2021.V17.N4.A7MaRDI QIDQ2071013zbMATH OpenFDO

Authors Shamgar Gurevich, Roger Howe

Publication date 25 January 2022

Published in Pure and Applied Mathematics Quarterly (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.12369

zbMATH Keywords

character ratioeta correspondencerandom walksrepresentations of general linear groupstensor rank

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Representation-theoretic methods; automorphic representations over local and global fields (11F70) Linear algebraic groups over finite fields (20G40) Lie groups (22E99)

Abstract: There are many formulas that express interesting properties of a finite group G in terms of sums over its characters. For estimating these sums, one of the most salient quantities to understand is the character ratio trace(pi(g)) / dim(pi), for an irreducible representation pi of G and an element g of G. It turns out [Gurevich-Howe15, Gurevich-Howe17] that for classical groups G over finite fields there are several (compatible) invariants of representations that provide strong information on the character ratios. We call these invariants collectively rank. Rank suggests a new way to organize the representations of classical groups over finite and local fields - a way in which the building blocks are the "smallest" representations. This is in contrast to Harish-Chandra's philosophy of cusp forms that is the main organizational principle since the 60s, and in it the building blocks are the cuspidal representations which are, in some sense, the "LARGEST". The philosophy of cusp forms is well adapted to establishing the Plancherel formula for reductive groups over local fields, and led to Lusztig's classification of the irreducible representations of such groups over finite fields. However, analysis of character ratios might benefit from a different approach. In this note we discuss further the notion of tensor rank for GL_n over a finite field F_q and demonstrate how to get information on representations of a given tensor rank using tools coming from the recently studied eta correspondence, as well as the well known philosophy of cusp forms, mentioned just above. A significant discovery so far is that although the dimensions of the irreducible representations of a given tensor rank vary by quite a lot (they can differ by large powers of q), for certain group elements of interest the character ratios of these irreps are nearly equal to each other.

Review text

In the paper under the review, the authors study and further develop several invariants of representations which provide strong information regarding the character ratios, in the case of the general linear group over the finite field. Let \(\omega\) stand for the permutation representation of \(\mathrm{GL}_n\) over the finite field \(\mathbb{F}_q\), on the space \(L^2(\mathbb{F}_q)\) given by \([\omega(g)(f)](x) = f(g^{-1}x)\), for \(g \in \mathrm{GL}_n\), \(f \in L^2(\mathbb{F}_q)\), and \(x \in \mathbb{F}_q\). Note that \(\omega\) is the restriction of the oscillator representation of \(\mathrm{Sp}_{2n}\) to \(\mathrm{GL}_n\), up to a sign. We denote the trivial representation by \(\mathbf{1}\) and by \(\widehat{\mathrm{GL}}_n(\omega^{\otimes^k})\) the set of all irreducible representations of \(\mathrm{GL}_n\) appearing in the \(k\)-fold tensor product of \(\omega\). An irreducible representation \(\rho\) of \(\mathrm{GL}_n\) is said to be of strict tensor rank \(k\) if it appears in \(\widehat{\mathrm{GL}}_n(\omega^{\otimes^k})\), but it does not appear in \(\widehat{\mathrm{GL}}_n(\omega^{\otimes^{k-1}})\), where for \(i = 0\) we let \(\widehat{\mathrm{GL}}_n(\omega^{\otimes^i}) = \mathbf{1}\). Further, we say that an irreducible representation \(\rho\) of \(\mathrm{GL}_n\) is of tensor rank \(k\) if it can be written as a tensor product of a character and an irreducible representation of strict tensor rank \(k\), but not less. For a fixed \(0 \leq k \leq n\) and an irreducible representation \(\rho\) of \(\mathrm{GL}_n\) of tensor rank \(k\), the authors provide an estimate for the character ratio \(\frac{\chi_{\rho(T)}}{\mathrm{dim}(\rho)}\) in terms of a certain integer combinatorially associated to \(\rho\). The provided estimate gives a significant improvement of known results and can also be used to induce the results for the irreducible representations of the special linear group \(\mathrm{SL}_n\) over \(\mathbb{F}_q\). The paper under the review contains several illustrative numerical examples and an application of the obtained results to certain random walks.

Recommendations

• Rank and duality in representation theory
• Harmonic analysis on the finite symmetric space \(\mathrm{GL}(n,K)/\mathrm{GL}(1,K)\times \mathrm{GL}(n-1,K)\)
• Character and Fixed Point Ratios in Finite Classical Groups
• Character degrees and random walks in finite groups of Lie type
• Small representations of finite classical groups

Cited in

(8)

• On values of the Bessel function for generic representations of finite general linear groups
• On Ginzburg-Kaplan gamma factors and Bessel-Speh functions for finite general linear groups
• Duality theory for Clifford tensor powers
• On matrix Kloosterman sums and Hall-Littlewood polynomials
• Functor morphing and representations of automorphism groups of modules
• On exotic matrix exponential sums and Bessel-Speh functions
• Combinatorics. Abstracts from the workshop held January 4--9, 2026
• Rank and duality in representation theory

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