Principal series for general linear groups over finite commutative rings
Tyrone Crisp, Ehud Meir, Uri Onn

TL;DR
This paper constructs a family of representations for the general linear group over any finite commutative ring, extending the principal series concept beyond finite fields.
Contribution
It introduces a new class of representations for $ ext{GL}_n(R)$ over finite commutative rings, generalizing principal series representations from finite fields.
Findings
Representations mirror intertwining properties of classical principal series.
Extension of principal series to general finite commutative rings.
Framework applicable to a broad class of rings.
Abstract
We construct, for any finite commutative ring , a family of representations of the general linear group whose intertwining properties mirror those of the principal series for over a finite field.
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Principal series for general linear groups over finite
commutative rings
Tyrone Crisp
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Maine, Orono, ME 04469-5752, USA
,
Ehud Meir
Institute of Mathematics, University of Aberdeen, Fraser Noble Building, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, UK
and
Uri Onn
Mathematical Sciences Institute, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
(Date: Last updated )
Abstract.
We construct, for any finite commutative ring , a family of representations of the general linear group whose intertwining properties mirror those of the principal series for over a finite field.
Key words and phrases:
Harish-Chandra induction, principal series, general linear groups, finite commutative rings
2010 Mathematics Subject Classification:
Primary 20G05; Secondary 20C33, 20C15, 20C05.
1. Introduction
Among the irreducible, complex representations of reductive groups over finite fields, the simplest to construct and to classify are the principal series: those obtained by Harish-Chandra induction from a minimal Levi subgroup; see, for instance, [HK80]. In this paper we use a generalisation of Harish-Chandra induction to construct a ‘principal series’ of representations of the group , where is any finite commutative ring with identity. Our main results assert that the well-known intertwining relations among the principal series for over a finite field also hold for the representations that we construct.
The study of the principal series for reductive groups over finite fields can be viewed as the first step in the program to understand all irreducible complex representations of such groups in terms of what Harish-Chandra called the ‘philosophy of cusp forms’ [HC70, Spr70b]. This program has met with considerable success. The basic ideas appear already in Green’s determination [Gre55] of the irreducible characters of , where is a finite field, and these ideas have since been developed and generalised to a very great extent; see [DM91] for an overview.
The theory for groups over finite rings is in a far less advanced state. Most efforts so far have been directed toward groups over principal ideal rings: see [Hil93, Hil95a, Hil95b, Hil94, Lus04, Lus17, Onn08, Sta11, CS17, SS17, KOS18, Sta17]. By contrast, the results presented below are valid for all finite rings, and they depend on the algebraic properties of the base ring in only a very limited way. For instance, we give a uniform construction of a family of irreducible representations of for all finite local rings , and to our knowledge these are the first results obtained in this degree of generality.
The present paper is part of a project whose aim is to extend the philosophy of cusp forms to reductive groups over finite rings. Our construction, which is a special case of a general induction procedure developed in [CMO19], extends in a natural way to produce more general ‘Harish-Chandra series’. The analysis of the intertwining properties of these more general series seems, however, to be substantially more involved than the results for the principal series presented here. See [CMO19, Section 5] and [CMO20] for some partial results in this more general setting.
Notation and definitions.
Let be a finite commutative ring with . Let , let be the subgroup of diagonal matrices in , and let and be the upper-unipotent subgroup and the lower-unipotent subgroup, respectively, in . We write , , etc., when it is necessary to specify .
The ring decomposes as a direct product of local rings: , and this decomposition is unique up to permuting the factors [McD74, Theorem VI.2]. There is a corresponding decomposition , and similarly for , , and . If is a local ring then we let be the subgroup of monomial matrices in , that is, products of permutation matrices with diagonal matrices. If is not local then we define , where the are the local factors of as above. Let . It will be convenient to realise as a subgroup of , as follows: if is local, then we identify with the group of permutation matrices; and in the general case we identify with the product of the permutation subgroups in . Note that following Lemma 4, we will be able to assume without loss of generality that is a local ring.
If is a representation of on a complex vector space , and if , then we let denote the representation . We let .
For each subgroup we let denote the idempotent in the complex group ring corresponding to the trivial character of : . Since normalises and , the idempotents and commute with inside .
We consider the functors
[TABLE]
[TABLE]
where denotes the category of complex representations, identified in the usual way with the category of left -modules. This is a special case of the construction defined in [CMO19, Section 2], which generalises a definition due to Dat [Dat09]. The functors and are two-sided adjoints to one another; see [CMO19, Theorem 2.15] for a proof of this and other basic properties.
Definition**.**
Let us say that an irreducible representation of is in the principal series if it is isomorphic to a subrepresentation of for some representation of .
Example**.**
If is a field, then the map is known to be an isomorphism of - bimodules; see [HL94, Theorem 2.4]. It follows that the functors and are naturally isomorphic to the familiar functors of Harish-Chandra induction and restriction, i.e. the functors of tensor product with the bimodules and , respectively. The same is not true if is not a product of fields. Revisiting an example from [CMO19], let denote the trivial representation of . Then , with acting by permutations of . The number of distinct irreducible subrepresentations in depends in a delicate way on the underlying ring ; for instance, for with and , this number depends on both and [OPV06]. By contrast, it follows from Theorem 2 below that for any the number of distinct irreducible subrepresentations of is equal to , where , is the partition function, and is the number of maximal ideals in .
Example**.**
Suppose that is a finite discrete valuation ring, with maximal ideal and residue field , and let be the largest integer such that . Reduction modulo gives rise to a group extension
[TABLE]
which one can use to study the representations of via Clifford theory; see [Hil93], for example. In [Hil95a], Hill identified a class of representations that are particularly amenable to this approach: an irreducible representation of is called regular if its restriction to contains a character whose stabiliser under the adjoint action of has minimal dimension. Explicit constructions of all such representations are given in [SS17, KOS18].
An application of [CMO19, Theorem 3.4] gives the following criterion for regularity of the induced representations : if is an irreducible representation of , then is regular if and only if the restriction of to the subgroup has trivial stabiliser under the permutation action of . Moreover, the representations , for satisfying the above condition, account for all of the regular representations associated to the split semisimple classes in .
For , all of the principal series representations of can be described in terms of regular representations, as follows. Let be an irreducible representation of . If is irreducible, then there is a character , an integer , and a regular representation of associated to a split semisimple class in such that is isomorphic to the representation , where is pulled back to a representation of . If is not irreducible, then there is a character such that is isomorphic to the representation , where is the trivial representation, and is the Steinberg representation of pulled back to . (These assertions follow easily from Theorem 3 and Lemma 15, below, and from [CMO19, Theorem 3.4].) For the relationship between the principal series and the regular representations becomes more complicated.
2. Main results
We will show that the following well-known properties of the Harish-Chandra functors are shared by the functors and for an arbitrary finite commutative ring.
Theorem 1**.**
There is a natural isomorphism of functors on . Consequently, if and are irreducible representations of , then
[TABLE]
When , we have the following more precise statement:
Theorem 2**.**
For each irreducible representation of one has as algebras.
Theorems 1 and 2 readily imply the following combinatorial formula for the number of principal series representations. Following [And08], we let denote the number of multipartitions of with parts: i.e., the number of -tuples , where each is a partition of some non-negative integer , and .
Corollary 3**.**
If is isomorphic to a product of finite local rings, and for each we set , then the principal series of contains precisely distinct isomorphism classes of irreducible representations.
Remarks**.**
In the case where is a field, Theorems 1 and 2 are essentially due to Green [Gre55]; see [Ste51] for the case , and see [Spr70a] for an exposition. Both of these results have been generalised to arbitrary Harish-Chandra series for arbitrary reductive groups: see [HC70] and [HL80], respectively. 2.
Theorems 1 and 2 can be extended, using [CMO19, Theorem 2.15(5)], to the setting of smooth representations of the profinite groups , where is the ring of integers in a nonarchimedean local field.
3. Proofs
The first step in the proof of the main results is to reduce to the case of local rings.
Lemma 4**.**
If Theorems 1 and 2 and Corollary 3 are true for all finite commutative local rings, then they are true for all finite commutative rings.
Proof.
Let be a finite commutative ring, and write as a product of local rings . All of the groups and the representation categories in Theorems 1 and 2 and in Corollary 3 then decompose into products accordingly: , , and so on. The bimodule decomposes as the tensor product of the bimodules , and likewise for , so the functors and are compatible with the above decompositions. By definition, the group also decomposes compatibly. Thus Theorems 1 and 2 and Corollary 3 over follow immediately from the corresponding results over the local factors . ∎
Assume from now on that is a local ring. Let denote the maximal ideal of , and let denote the residue field . Recall that is then the group of permutation matrices in . We write for the word-length function on with respect to the standard generating set .
The following proposition collects the group-theoretical ingredients of the proof of Theorem 1.
Proposition 5**.**
- (a)
The multiplication map is injective. 2. (b)
The reduction-mod-* map is surjective.* 3. (c)
For each subgroup of , let denote the intersection of with the kernel of the above reduction homomorphism. Then the multiplication map is a bijection, and the same is true for any ordering of the three factors. 4. (d)
For each the multiplication maps
[TABLE]
are bijections, where , etc. 5. (e)
* is the disjoint union , where .* 6. (f)
For each with and one has .
Proof.
Parts (a), (b), (c) and (d) are well-known and easily verified. Part (e) follows immediately from the Bruhat decomposition of [CR87, (65.4)].
In part (f) we may assume without loss of generality that is a field, since is empty if its reduction modulo is empty. Let denote the longest element of , and write for the upper-triangular subgroup of . We will show that under the stated assumptions on and one has
[TABLE]
Since , while , we see that (6) implies that .
To prove (6) we recall (from, e.g., [CR87, (65.10)]) that is a BN-pair in (note that we are assuming to be a field). This means, among other things, that for all and all ; and that for all . The proof of (6) is by induction on . If , so that , then unless . For the inductive step, write with and . We then have
[TABLE]
We have , and , so the first term in the union is empty by induction. We have , and in particular , so the second term in the union is also empty. This proves (6). ∎
We equip with the Hermitian inner product for which the group elements constitute an orthonormal basis; and with the conjugate-linear involution defined on basis elements by . The two structures are related by the identity for all . An element is called self-adjoint if .
Lemma 7**.**
Let denote the unital subalgebra of generated by the idempotents and . There is a self-adjoint, invertible element in the centre of such that and .
Proof.
This is true for any pair of orthogonal projections on a finite-dimensional Hilbert space: see [Hal69, Theorem 2], for example. ∎
Remark**.**
If is a field then [HL94, Theorem 2.4] implies that there is a unique element as in Lemma 7. This is not the case over a general ring.
Lemma 8**.**
For each we have .
Proof.
It is clear that and similarly that . Proposition 5(d) gives , and it follows that . The same reasoning gives , and so . ∎
Lemma 9**.**
For each the map
[TABLE]
is an isomorphism of - bimodules.
Proof.
The following argument is taken from [Dat09, Lemme 2.9]. The map is well-defined, because
[TABLE]
by Lemma 8. The map is injective, because for each we have
[TABLE]
where is as in Lemma 7, and in the first equality we used that . The domain and target of are isomorphic as vector spaces: indeed, , where is the longest element of . Since is injective it is thus also an isomorphism. ∎
For each subset , we let denote the vector subspace of spanned by .
Proposition 10**.**
For each the map
[TABLE]
is an isomorphism of -bimodules.
Proof.
is clearly a bimodule map. Let us show that it is injective. For we have
[TABLE]
The maps
[TABLE]
and
[TABLE]
are isomorphisms by Lemma 9, so we are left to prove that the map
[TABLE]
is injective on . It is, because Proposition 5(a) implies that the cosets are all disjoint as ranges over . Thus is injective.
To prove that is surjective, first note that because is normal in . Since and for all and , we find that is spanned by elements of the form , where and . We will show that each element of this form is in the image of .
For each we have
[TABLE]
by Proposition 5(c). Let , and be the (unique) functions satisfying for all . Writing and , we then have
[TABLE]
Since we have for each . Since we have , and consequently for each . Continuing the computation with the space-saving notation , we find that
[TABLE]
and so . ∎
Proposition 11**.**
The set is linearly independent.
Proof.
We know from Proposition 10 that for each the set is linearly independent. We must show that for different choices of these sets are independent from one another.
Suppose we had elements , not all zero, with . Let be an element of minimal length such that is nonzero. To compactify the notation we shall write .
Let be as in Lemma 7, and write . Thus is a self-adjoint, invertible element of which commutes with and and which satisfies . For each with such that we have
[TABLE]
Here we have repeatedly used the equality ; in the fourth step we used Lemma 8 to replace with and to replace with ; in the fifth step we used Proposition 5(d) to write ; and in the final equality we used Proposition 5(f), which applies because of the minimality of , and which implies that the functions and are supported on disjoint subsets of and are therefore orthogonal.
It follows from this that
[TABLE]
where the last equality holds because is self-adjoint, is a self-adjoint idempotent, and and commute. Thus . Since is invertible, and left multiplication by is injective on (Lemma 9), we conclude that . By Proposition 10 this implies that , contradicting our choice of and completing the proof of the proposition. ∎
Proof of Theorem 1.
The functor is naturally isomorphic to the functor of tensor product (over ) with the -bimodule , while the functor is naturally isomorphic to the tensor product with the bimodule . Since we have
[TABLE]
Proposition 10 thus implies that the -bimodule map
[TABLE]
is surjective. Proposition 11 implies that this map is injective, so it is an isomorphism of bimodules, and induces a natural isomorphism of functors . The formula for the intertwining number follows from this isomorphism and from the fact that and are adjoints. ∎
We now turn to the proof of Theorem 2. Every irreducible representation of the abelian group has the form
[TABLE]
where each is a linear character . For each such we let be the corresponding primitive central idempotent in .
Lemma 12**.**
The algebra is isomorphic to the subalgebra of .
Proof.
We have
[TABLE]
where is as in Lemma 7. Since and are commuting idempotents in , their product is an idempotent and we have via the action of on by right multiplication. Now is a finite-dimensional complex semisimple algebra, so it is isomorphic to its opposite, and we have . ∎
Lemma 13**.**
For the trivial representation of we have as algebras.
Proof.
First suppose that is a field, so that the functor is isomorphic to the functor of Harish-Chandra induction. Then, as we noted above, is isomorphic to the permutation representation on , and the isomorphism is a special case of well-known results of Iwahori-Matsumoto and Tits (see [CR87, §68] for an exposition).
Now let be a local ring with residue field . The quotient map induces a surjective map of algebras
[TABLE]
Theorem 1 implies that the domain of (14) is isomorphic as a vector space to , while we have just seen that the range of (14) is isomorphic as an algebra to . Since (14) is surjective, it is an algebra isomorphism. ∎
Remark**.**
The isomorphism in Lemma 13 is not canonical. One can trace through the various maps appearing in the proof to construct a set of Iwahori-Hecke generators of , although this will depend on the choice of an element as in Lemma 7.
Lemma 15**.**
Let be an irreducible representation of , let be a character of , and let . Then .
Proof.
The algebra automorphism
[TABLE]
sends to , and fixes and . Thus (16) induces an isomorphism of -modules
[TABLE]
Lemma 17**.**
If is a tensor-multiple of a single character of , then as algebras.
Proof.
Lemma 15 ensures that . ∎
Lemma 18**.**
For each there is a natural isomorphism of functors .
Proof.
The functor is given by tensor product with the - bimodule , while the functor is given by tensor product with . These two bimodules are isomorphic, by Lemma 9. ∎
Lemma 18 implies that in order to compute the intertwining algebra for an arbitrary character of we may permute the factors so that takes the form
[TABLE]
(The exponents indicate tensor powers.) We then have .
In the next lemma we shall consider general linear groups of different sizes, and we shall accordingly embellish the notation with subscripts to indicate the size of the matrices involved: so, for example, denotes the diagonal subgroup in , and is a functor from to .
Lemma 20**.**
If is as in (19) then \operatorname{End}_{G_{n}}(\operatorname{i}_{n}\chi)\cong\bigotimes_{j=1}^{k}\operatorname{End}_{G_{n_{j}}}\big{(}\operatorname{i}_{n_{j}}(\chi_{j}^{n_{j}})\big{)} as algebras.
Proof.
Let us write for the block-diagonal subgroup , which contains as subgroups the groups and . Let be the subgroup of block-upper-unipotent matrices
[TABLE]
and let be the corresponding group of block-lower-unipotent matrices.
Let be the functor of tensor product with the - bimodule . The semidirect product decompositions and give equalities and , and hence an isomorphism of - bimodules
[TABLE]
It follows that
[TABLE]
Since is a functor, we obtain from this isomorphism a map of algebras
[TABLE]
Now, the -bimodule map
[TABLE]
is injective, because the multiplication map is one-to-one. It follows from this that the identity functor on is a subfunctor of . Thus is a faithful functor, and in particular the map (21) is injective. Since the domain and the range of this map have the same dimension as complex vector spaces, by Theorem 1, we conclude that (21) is an algebra isomorphism. ∎
Proof of Theorem 2.
Lemma 18 allows us to assume that has the form (19), and in this case we have algebra isomorphisms
[TABLE]
Proof of Corollary 3.
Choose an ordering of the character group . Lemma 18 and the intertwining number formula in Theorem 1 imply that for each principal series representation of there is a unique -tuple of non-negative integers having , such that embeds in .
Theorem 2 implies that the number of distinct irreducible subrepresentations of is equal to the number of distinct irreducible representations of . The latter number is equal to the number of -tuples , where each is a partition of . Allowing the exponents to vary shows that the total number of principal series representations is equal to , as claimed. ∎
Acknowledgments
The first and second authors were partly supported by the Danish National Research Foundation through the Centre for Symmetry and Deformation (DNRF92). The first author was also supported by fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, and from the Radboud Excellence Initiative at Radboud University Nijmegen. The second author was also supported by the Research Training Group 1670 “Mathematics Inspired by String Theory and Quantum Field Theory.” The third author acknowledges the support of the Israel Science Foundation and of the Australian Research Council.
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