Higher polynomial identities for mutations of associative algebras
Murray R. Bremner, Jose Brox, Juana S\'anchez-Ortega

TL;DR
This paper investigates polynomial identities in the mutation algebra derived from associative algebras, simplifying known identities in degree 4, and exploring new identities in degrees 5 and 6.
Contribution
It provides a simplified set of identities for degree 4 and identifies new identities emerging in degrees 5 and 6 for mutation products.
Findings
Only two identities generate degree 4 identities.
Adding one identity suffices for degree 5.
New identities appear in degree 6.
Abstract
We study polynomial identities satisfied by the mutation product on the underlying vector space of an associative algebra , where are fixed elements of . We simplify known results for identities in degree , proving that only two identities are necessary and sufficient to generate them all; in degree 5, we show that adding one new identity suffices; in degree 6, we demonstrate the existence of a number of new identities.
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Topics in Algebra · Sphingolipid Metabolism and Signaling · Multiple Myeloma Research and Treatments
HIGHER POLYNOMIAL IDENTITIES FOR MUTATIONS OF ASSOCIATIVE ALGEBRAS
Murray R. Bremner
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
,
Jose Brox
University of Coimbra, CMUC, Department of Mathematics, 3004-504, Coimbra, Portugal
and
Juana Sánchez-Ortega
Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Abstract.
We study polynomial identities satisfied by the mutation product on the underlying vector space of an associative algebra , where are fixed elements of . We simplify known results for identities in degree , proving that only two identities are necessary and sufficient to generate them all; in degree 5, we show that adding one new identity suffices; in degree 6, we demonstrate the existence of a number of new identities.
Key words and phrases:
Associative algebras, mutation algebras, nonassociative algebras, Lie-admissible, Jordan-admissible, polynomial identities, algebraic operads, representation theory of the symmetric group, computer algebra, theoretical particle physics.
2020 Mathematics Subject Classification:
Primary 18M70; Secondary 16R10, 16W10, 17A30, 17A50, 17B60, 17C65, 17D25, 68W30
Murray Bremner was supported by the Discovery Grant Algebraic Operads from NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Jose Brox was supported by the Portuguese Government through grant SFRH/BPD/118665/2016 (FCT/Centro 2020/Portugal 2020/ESF). Juana Sánchez-Ortega was supported by a CSUR grant from the NRF, the National Research Foundation of South Africa. This work was partially supported by the Centre for Mathematics of the University of Coimbra - UID/MAT/00324/2020, funded by the Portuguese Government through FCT/MCTES.
1. Introduction
Let be an associative algebra over a field of characteristic 0. Fix two elements and define a new bilinear operation on the underlying vector space:
[TABLE]
The resulting nonassociative algebra is called the -mutation of .
Mutation algebras were introduced by theoretical physicists around 1980; see [8, equation (1.6b)] and [17, equation (66)]. For a survey of early work by mathematicians on this topic, see [15]. For a detailed exposition of the structure theory of mutation algebras, see [6]. For mutations of nonassociative algebras, see [2].
To motivate the investigation of polynomial identities for mutation algebras, we paraphrase some comments from [6, Preface]. Mutation algebras are both Lie- and Jordan-admissible, but they also satisfy other more complex identities of higher degree; see [6, Chapter 5]. It is an open problem to determine a complete set of independent identities satisfied by all mutation algebras for arbitrary , . In fact, mutation algebras do not form a variety defined by polynomial identities. We note that Lie- and Jordan-admissible algebras were introduced by Albert [1, §IV.1-2].
Polynomial identities for mutation algebras were first studied systematically by Montaner [14] using the classical techniques of nonassociative algebra [16, 18]. That work did not consider the original operation but decomposed it as the sum of commutative and anticommutative operations: where
[TABLE]
For further information about the notion of polarization of a binary operation, see [12]. Furthermore, the work of Montaner considered identities which are not necessarily multilinear, but hand calculation restricted the degree of the identities to .
We use a different approach which allows us to simplify the known results in degree 4, to determine a complete set of identities in degree 5, and to demonstrate the existence of a number of new identities in degree 6:
- •
We use elementary concepts from the theory of algebraic operads [3, 10, 11, 13].
- •
Our main tool is computer algebra, in particular:
- –
Linear algebra over the rational numbers and finite prime fields: the row canonical form of a matrix using Gaussian elimination.
- –
Linear algebra over the integers: the Hermite normal form of a matrix and the Lenstra-Lenstra-Lovász algorithm (LLL, see [9, 5]) for lattice basis reduction.
- •
We consider only multilinear identities for the original operation : this allows us to use the representation theory of the symmetric group [4] to decompose the computations into small pieces corresponding to irreducible representations.
2. Algebraic Operads
2.1. The free nonsymmetric operad
We write for the set of all complete rooted plane binary trees with leaves denoted by asterisks; for there is only the exceptional tree with one leaf and no root, . Each tree in contains internal nodes (including the root); hence the size of is the Catalan number . We write for the set of all association types in degree : balanced placements of parentheses in a sequence of asterisks. There is a bijection defined recursively: ; for every internal node with left and right subtrees and we replace the subtree with root by . For example,
[TABLE]
(We omit the outermost pair of parentheses corresponding to the root of the tree.)
If and then the partial composition for is obtained by grafting the right tree into the left at position : that is, identifying leaf of (from left to right) with the root of . For example,
[TABLE]
In terms of association types, corresponds to substitution of for argument of ; we omit the parentheses if . For example, .
Partial composition is nonassociative but satisfies sequential and parallel axioms [3, Definition 3.2.2.3] (see also [13, 10]). We state these axioms following [11, Definition 11, Figure 1]. If , , then
[TABLE]
Let denote the disjoint union of the for :
[TABLE]
The set together with all partial compositions is isomorphic to the free nonsymmetric set operad generated by one binary operation corresponding to the tree with root and two leaves. (Nonsymmetric means that we have not yet introduced the action of the symmetric group on the arguments.) Let denote the vector space with basis . On the direct sum
[TABLE]
we extend partial compositions so that they are linear in each factor. The vector space together with the extended partial compositions is isomorphic to the free nonsymmetric vector operad generated by .
2.2. The free symmetric operad
Consider an integer and the set of indeterminates . We write for the symmetric group of all permutations of . For each and we obtain the labelled tree consisting of with leaves labelled from left to right. We write for the set of all such labelled trees. Similarly, we apply the association type for to the multilinear associative monomial and obtain the nonassociative monomial . We write for the set of all such nonassociative monomials. The bijection extends in the obvious way to the bijection . For example,
[TABLE]
We extend partial compositions to labelled trees. Consider two labelled trees and . If then the partial composition must be a tree with leaves labelled by a permutation in . (Simple grafting of one labelled tree onto the other does not produce a permutation.) This must be done in a manner which is equivariant with respect to the action of the symmetric group. Following [13, Definion 1.37] with minor changes, we have:
- •
A leaf of with label for retains its label.
- •
A leaf of with label for is relabelled .
- •
A leaf of with label for is relabelled .
For example,
[TABLE]
Let denote the -module with linear basis ; we use the natural left action on labels (not on positions). The direct sum of these -modules,
[TABLE]
together with the bilinear extension of the partial compositions, is isomorphic to the free symmetric vector operad generated by . (This binary operation has no symmetry: it is neither commutative nor anticommutative.)
An ideal in the free symmetric operad is a graded subspace (that is, for ) such that
- •
: each homogeneous space is an -module (that is, closed under the action of the symmetric group), and
- •
if and then () and () belong to (that is, is closed under partial compositions).
The ideal generated by homogeneous elements is the smallest ideal of containing If then we say that is a minimal set of generators for if no proper subset of generates ; this condition does not uniquely determine .
2.3. Associativity, nullary operations, and the expansion map
In general, an -ary operation () on a vector space is a multilinear map . For we have so a unary operation is simply a linear operator on ; for we have so a nullary operation is equivalent to the choice of a constant vector . If we write for the vector space of all -ary operations on , then the direct sum , together with partial compositions (substitution of the output of one operation for an input of another operation), is the endomorphism operad of .
Let , be symbols denoting nullary operations on some underlying vector space. For , consider monomials with an odd number of factors such that the odd-indexed factors () form a multilinear associative monomial for some , and each of the even-indexed factors is either or . We write for the set of all such monomials; acts by permuting the odd-indexed factors. For and , we define for by substituting for (with the appropriate change of labels). We write for the vector space whose basis consists of all such monomials. The direct sum is a suboperad of the symmetric associative operad with two nullary operations.
Definition 2.1**.**
The expansion map on monomials is defined recursively. For a leaf with label , we set . If denotes an internal node with left and right subtrees and with then
[TABLE]
That is, we replace each internal node by the operation .
If we represent trees by nonassociative monomials and leaf labels by letters then and
[TABLE]
For the expansions in degree 4, see Figure 1.
Definition 2.2**.**
For each , the expansion map is a morphism of -modules; we write . Combining all the expansion maps we obtain the morphism of operads with kernel . The polynomial identities satisfied by for all associative algebras and all coincide with , which is an operad ideal in . These identities are the linear dependence relations among the expansions of the nonassociative monomials. We refer to as the -module of all identities in degree .
Our ultimate goal is to determine a set of generators for .
3. Polynomial Identities in Degree
Definition 3.1**.**
In a nonassociative algebra, the Lie-admissible identity is
[TABLE]
where is the sign homomorphism. If then the commutator satisfies the Jacobi identity.
We provide a different proof of the next result using elementary linear algebra.
Theorem 3.2**.**
[14].* Over a field of characteristic 0, every multilinear polynomial identity in degree satisfied by every mutation of every associative algebra is a consequence of the Lie-admissible identity.*
Proof.
It is straightforward to verify that for . The monomial basis of consists of 12 elements ordered first by association type and then by permutation of the variables:
[TABLE]
The monomial basis of consists of 24 elements ordered first by lex order of the pair of nullary operations (, , , ) and then by permutation of the variables:
[TABLE]
The expansion map is determined by its values on the nonassociative monomials with the identity permutation of the arguments; see (1). We apply all permutations in to the arguments and store the coefficients of the monomials in the matrix representing with respect to the ordered bases; see Figure 2. That is, the entry of is the coefficient of the th associative monomial (3) in the expansion of the th nonassociative monomial (2). It is easy to check that this matrix has rank 11 and hence nullity 1, and that a basis for its nullspace is the coefficient vector of the Lie-admissible identity. ∎
4. Polynomial Identities in Degree
Montaner [14] (see also [6, Chapter 5]) showed that every identity in degree satisfied by every mutation algebra is a consequence of the Lie-admissible identity, the Jordan-admissible identity, and two further identities; furthermore, none of these identities is a consequence of the other three. In this section we use computer algebra to simplify this result: we discover two new multilinear identities in degree 4, which are not consequences of the Lie-admissible identity, and which generate all identities in degree 4 (including the Jordan-admissible identity).
Definition 4.1**.**
In a nonassociative algebra, the linearized Jordan identity is
[TABLE]
If we expand each nonassociative product as the anticommutator then we obtain the Jordan-admissible identity:
[TABLE]
If then the anticommutator satisfies the Jordan identity.
Definition 4.2**.**
In a nonassociative algebra, we consider the following identities where and :
[TABLE]
In identity , the first three terms include a cyclic sum of associators [7, Equation (5)], and each term in the summation can be written as the difference of two associators.
The next result improves [14, Theorem 2.3]: we have only two new identities in degree 4, not three. In addition, even though our new identities and are multilinear, each contains only 18 nonassociative monomials (after expanding the associators and anticommutators), whereas the new identities of [14] have 48 monomials (the Jordan-admissible identity), 20 monomials (identity ), and 52 monomials (identity ). Furthermore, our new identities have only coefficients , whereas identity has coefficients 1, 2, 4, 6. Finally, we show that the new identities also generate the consequences of the Lie-admissible identity, and thus the latter do not need to be considered.
Theorem 4.3**.**
Every identity in degree 4 satisfied by every mutation algebra follows from the identities and from Definition 4.2.
Proof.
We first consider the expansion matrix. The monomial basis of consists of 120 elements ordered first by association type and then by lex order of permutations (indicated by superscripts):
[TABLE]
The monomial basis of consists of 192 elements ordered first by lex order of the triple of nullary operations and then by lex order of permutations :
[TABLE]
The expansion map is determined by its values on the nonassociative monomials with the identity permutation of the arguments (Figure 1). We apply all permutations in to the arguments in the expansions and store the coefficients in the matrix representing with respect to the ordered bases (4) and (5). The entry of is the coefficient of the th associative monomial in the expansion of the th nonassociative monomial. Thus each column of contains 1 and each four times.
Next, we consider the consequences of the Lie-admissible identity. The identity is skew-symmetric:
[TABLE]
We write for the operad ideal generated by ; clearly . The homogeneous component is generated as an -module by the partial compositions
[TABLE]
We refer to the elements of as the old identities in degree 4. Applying all permutations to the generators (6) allows us to represent as the row space of the matrix whose columns are labelled by the monomials (4). The row space of is a subspace (in fact an -submodule) of the nullspace of the matrix . We set and write for the matrix in RCF (row canonical form) whose row space equals that of .
Finally, we consider the new identities. The elements of the nullspace of are the coefficient vectors of . We set and write for the matrix in RCF whose row space is the nullspace of . The rows of span the -module of all identities in degree 4. Clearly the row space of is a subspace of the row space of , and hence . The quotient is the -module of new identities in degree 4, and its dimension is .
Let be the column indices of the leading 1s in and respectively. A linear basis of corresponds to (the cosets of) the rows of whose leading 1s have column indices in . It is straightforward using the module generators algorithm [4] to compute a subset of this linear basis which represents a set of -module generators for the quotient module. Computations with the computer algebra system SageMath show that and hence has rank ; the nonzero entries of are . For each row of , we multiply the coefficients by the LCM of their denominators to obtain integers and then divide by the GCD of these integers to obtain vectors with relatively prime integer coefficients. The squared Euclidean lengths of the resulting vectors with multiplicities in parentheses are
[TABLE]
We sort the rows of the new integer matrix, also called , by increasing length. Further SageMath computations show that , which implies that the quotient module has dimension 13.
We next use the module generators algorithm again to determine the smallest subset of the shortest rows of which generates the quotient module . We obtain two identities and verify that neither is a consequence of the other. The first has 18 terms and coefficients (squared length 18); the second has 33 terms and coefficients (squared length 42).
We can obtain better results using linear algebra over the integers; this requires replacing the RCF by the HNF (Hermite normal form), and applying the LLL algorithm [5] to determine shorter integer vectors.
The entries of the matrix belong to . We compute the HNF of the transpose , denoted by , and a square matrix with such that . Since has rank 88, the bottom 32 rows of are zero, and hence the bottom 32 rows of form a matrix whose rows form a lattice basis of the left nullspace of (the right nullspace of ). (By a lattice basis we mean a set of free generators for a submodule of a free -module.)
After applying the LLL algorithm to the lattice generated by the rows of , we obtain a matrix whose nonzero entries are and whose rows have the following squared Euclidean lengths with multiplicities given in parentheses:
[TABLE]
Further computations show that the quotient module is generated by two rows of with squared length 18. These are the coefficient vectors of the identities and . Moreover, the -module generated by and has dimension 32, so it coincides with . ∎
Remark 4.4**.**
Since the dimension of is 32 and the permutation of variables of a multilinear identity of degree can produce at most linearly independent identities, a lower bound on the number of generators of as an -module is . Therefore the set of generators of has minimum cardinal.
Corollary 4.5**.**
Consider these three consequences of the Lie-admissible identity:
[TABLE]
Then
[TABLE]
where stands for the Jordan-admissible identity.
Proof.
Straightforward computation. ∎
5. Polynomial Identities in Degree 5
In degree 5 there are 14 association types and hence multilinear nonassociative monomials; there are associative -monomials.
Recall that in degree 4, identities and from Definition 4.2 generate the kernel of the expansion map as an -module. Each identity in degree 4 produces six consequences in degree 5:
[TABLE]
Theorem 5.1**.**
Every identity in degree 5 satisfied by every mutation algebra follows from the consequences of and in degree 4, and the new identity in degree 5 displayed in Figure 3.
Proof.
The proof is similar to that of degree . We order the monomial bases of and as in Theorem 4.3. We need to perform computations on the matrix representing the expansion map (with respect to the monomial bases above). To this end, we use the class of rational sparse matrices in SageMath.
The kernel of the expansion map is an -module of dimension 778 (comprising all identities). The twelve consequences (in degree 5) of identities and generate the -module of old identities, which has dimension 747. Hence the quotient module of new identities has dimension 31. We compute the HNF, denoted by , of and a square matrix with such that . The bottom 778 rows of produce a matrix whose rows form a lattice basis of the right nullspace of . Next, we apply the LLL algorithm to the lattice generated by the rows of to obtain the matrix ; we find that the -module is generated by one row of having 48 nonzero entries, which is the coefficient vector of identity . The computations required around 4GB of RAM, and had a runtime of 90 minutes, in an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X processor at 3.70GHz running SageMath 9.2 on Windows 10. ∎
Remark 5.2**.**
The dimension of is 778 and permuting the variables of a multilinear identity of degree can produce at most linearly independent identities, so a lower bound on the number of generators of as an -module is . In Theorem 5.1 we have obtained a set with 13 generators: the 12 consequences of identities and plus a new identity . In fact, it can be checked that is already generated by identity , the consequences of identity , and consequences , and of identity . Therefore an upper bound on the minimum number of generators of as an -module is .
6. Polynomial Identities in Degree 6
In degree 6 there are 42 association types and hence multilinear nonassociative monomials, and there are associative -monomials. So, to represent the expansion map as a whole we would need to use a matrix of size , which is too large to manipulate with our computer system. We use the representation theory of the symmetric group to reduce the problem to a set of matrices of smaller sizes and demonstrate the existence of a number of new identities in degree 6. We choose a set of conjugacy class representatives in and calculate the matrices representing these permutations on the modules of old and all identities. Comparing the traces of these matrices with the character table of , we obtain the multiplicities of the irreducible representations of the -modules.
Theorem 6.1**.**
For each of the 11 partitions of 6, the following table contains the multiplicity of each irreducible representation in the -modules of all identities (the kernel of the expansion map), the old identities (the consequences of the identities of lower degree), and the quotient module of new identities (the difference of the previous two multiplicities):
[TABLE]
Furthermore, the dimension of the quotient module of new identities is
[TABLE]
Proof.
These methods have been described in detail in [4, §§2.4–2.7]. ∎
Conjecture 6.2**.**
The kernel of the expansion map in all degrees, that is, the operad ideal (see Definition 2.2), is not finitely generated. In other words, no finite set of identities generates all the identities satisfied by all mutation algebras.
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