Curved Casimir operators and the BGG machinery

DOI10.3842/SIGMA.2007.111MaRDI QIDQ2473518zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Andreas Cap, Vladimír Souček

Publication date 27 February 2008

Published in SIGMA. Symmetry, Integrability and Geometry: Methods and Applications (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.3180, https://eudml.org/doc/54401, http://www.emis.de/journals/SIGMA/2007/111/

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zbMATH Keywords

BGG sequenceCasimir operatorinduced representationinvariant differential operatorparabolic geometrytractor bundle

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Semisimple Lie groups and their representations (22E46) Other special differential geometries (53A40) General geometric structures on manifolds (almost complex, almost product structures, etc.) (53C15) Invariance and symmetry properties for PDEs on manifolds (58J70)

Abstract: We prove that the Casimir operator acting on sections of a homogeneous vector bundle over a generalized flag manifold naturally extends to an invariant differential operator on arbitrary parabolic geometries. We study some properties of the resulting invariant operators and compute their action on various special types of natural bundles. As a first application, we give a very general construction of splitting operators for parabolic geometries. Then we discuss the curved Casimir operators on differential forms with values in a tractor bundle, which nicely relates to the machinery of BGG sequences. This also gives a nice interpretation of the resolution of a finite dimensional representation by (spaces of smooth vectors in) principal series representations provided by a BGG sequence.

Review text

Let \(G\) be a semisimple Lie group and \(P\subset G\) a parabolic subgroup. The authors show that the Casimir operator on a representation of \(G\) induced from \(P\) may be naturally extended to an invariant differential operator on parabolic geometries \((G,P)\). This extension, which the authors call the \textit{curved Casimir operator}, is described using the fundamental derivative (or `fundamental \(D\)-operator' in the terminology of [\textit{A. Čap} and \textit{A. Gover}, Trans. Am. Math. Soc. 354, No. 4, 1511--1548 (2002; Zbl 0997.53016)]. The authors obtain a simple formula for the curved Casimir operator on natural bundles, and then use the formula to show that this operator acts by a scalar on natural bundles induced by irreducible representations of \(P\). The authors also study the curved Casimir operator in the context of tractor bundles; this leads to a connection with the machinery of Bernstein-Gelfand-Gelfand (BGG) sequences. Finally, the article contains an interesting discussion about the relationship between eigenspaces of the Casimir operator and BGG resolutions: Restricting a twisted de Rham resolution to certain eigenspaces for the Casimir operator induces a resolution of a finite dimensional irreducible \(G\)-representation by principal series representations. The \(P\)-representations that induce these principal series representations are in turn duals of representations used to construct the generalized Verma modules in the BGG resolution (see Corollary 2).

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Cited in

(11)

• Metrics in projective differential geometry: the geometry of solutions to the metrizability equation
• Relative BGG sequences. II: BGG machinery and invariant operators
• How to prove the Baum-Connes conjecture for the groups \(S p(n, 1)\)?
• Poisson transforms adapted to BGG-complexes
• Conformally invariant quantization -- towards the complete classification
• Geometry of solutions to the c-projective metrizability equation
• The Baum-Connes conjecture: an extended survey
• A Poisson transform adapted to the Rumin complex
• First BGG operators on homogeneous conformal geometries
• First BGG operators via homogeneous examples
• Equivariant quantizations for AHS-structures

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