An introduction to harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group

Let S be the group of finite permutations of the naturals 1,2,... The subject of the paper is harmonic analysis for the Gelfand pair (G,K), where G stands for the product of two copies of S while K is the diagonal subgroup in G. The spherical dual to (G,K) (that is, the set of irreducible spherical unitary representations) is an infinite-dimensional space. For such Gelfand pairs, the conventional scheme of harmonic analysis is not applicable and it has to be suitably modified...

We study a 2-parametric family of probability measures on an infinite-dimensional simplex (the Thoma simplex). These measures originate in harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group (S.Kerov, G.Olshanski and A.Vershik, Comptes Rendus Acad. Sci. Paris I 316 (1993), 773-778). Our approach is to interpret them as probability distributions on a space of point configurations, i.e., as certain point stochastic processes, and to find the correlation functions of these process...

We construct a family of Pfaffian point processes relevant for the harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group. The correlation functions of these processes are representable as Pfaffians with matrix valued kernels. We give explicit formulae for the matrix valued kernels in terms of the classical Whittaker functions. The obtained formulae have the same structure as that arising in the study of symplectic ensembles of Random Matrix Theory. The paper is an extended vers...

Let $G$ be a finite group with $k$ conjugacy classes, and $S(\infty)$ be the infinite symmetric group, i.e. the group of finite permutations of $\left\{1,2,3,\ldots\right\}$. Then the wreath product $G_{\infty}=G\sim S(\infty)$ of $G$ with $S(\infty)$ (called the big wreath product) can be defined. The group $G_{\infty}$ is a generalization of the infinite symmetric group, and it is an example of a ``big'' group, in Vershik's terminology. For such groups the two-sided regular...

The goal of harmonic analysis on a (noncommutative) group is to decompose the most `natural' unitary representations of this group (like the regular representation) on irreducible ones. The infinite-dimensional unitary group U(infinity) is one of the basic examples of `big' groups whose irreducible representations depend on infinitely many parameters. Our aim is to explain what the harmonic analysis on U(infinity) consists of. We deal with unitary representations of a reaso...

We give a summary of the results from Parts I-V (math.RT/9804086, math.RT/9804087, math.RT/9804088, math.RT/9810013, math.RT/9810014). Our work originated from harmonic analysis on the infinite symmetric group. The problem of spectral decomposition for certain representations of this group leads to a family of probability measures on an infinite-dimensional simplex, which is a kind of dual object for the infinite symmetric group. To understand the nature of these measures w...

The infinite-dimensional unitary group U(infinity) is the inductive limit of growing compact unitary groups U(N). In this paper we solve a problem of harmonic analysis on U(infinity) stated in the previous paper math/0109193. The problem consists in computing spectral decomposition for a remarkable 4-parameter family of characters of U(infinity). These characters generate representations which should be viewed as analogs of nonexisting regular representation of U(infinity). ...

We discuss a connection between two areas of mathematics which until recently seemed to be rather distant from each other: (1) noncommutative harmonic analysis on groups and (2) some topics in probability theory related to random point processes. In order to make the paper accessible to readers not familiar with either of these areas, we explain all needed basic concepts. This is an extended version of G.Olshanski's talk at the 4th European Congress of Mathematics.

We study the representations of the infinite symmetric group induced from the identity representations of Young subgroups. It turns out that such induced representations can be either of type~I or of type~II. Each Young subgroup corresponds to a partition of the set of positive integers; depending on the sizes of blocks of this partition, we divide Young subgroups into two classes: large and small subgroups. The first class gives representations of type I, in particular, irre...

We study the category $\mathcal{A}$ of smooth semilinear representations of the infinite symmetric group over the field of rational functions in infinitely many variables. We establish a number of results about the structure of $\mathcal{A}$, e.g., classification of injective objects, finiteness of injective dimension, computation of the Grothendieck group, and so on. We also prove that $\mathcal{A}$ is (essentially) equivalent to a simpler linear algebraic category $\mathcal...