Character formulae for classical groups

Motivated by statistical applications, this paper introduces Cauchy identities for characters of the compact classical groups. These identities generalize the well-known Cauchy identity for characters of the unitary group, which are Schur functions of symmetric function theory. Application to statistical hypothesis testing is briefly sketched.

Let $G(q)$ be a Chevalley group over a finite field $F_q$. By Lusztig's and Shoji's work, the problem of computing the values of the unipotent characters of $G(q)$ is solved, in principle, by the theory of character sheaves; one issue in this solution is the determination of certain scalars relating two types of class functions on $G(q)$. We show that this issue can be reduced to the case where $q$ is a prime, which opens the way to use computer algebra methods. Here, and in ...

We give a new formula for the values of an irreducible character of the symmetric group S_n indexed by a partition of rectangular shape. Some observations and a conjecture are given concerning a generalization to arbitrary shapes.

Frobenius observed that the number of times an element of a finite group is obtained as a commutator is given by a specific combination of the irreducible characters of the group. More generally, for any word w the number of times an element is obtained by substitution in w is a class function. Thus, it has a presentation as a combination of irreducible characters, called its Fourier expansion. In this paper we present formulas regarding the Fourier expansion of words in whic...

The branching theorem expresses irreducible character values for the symmetric group $S_n$ in terms of those for $S_{n-1}$, but it gives the values only at elements of $S_n$ having a fixed point. We extend the theorem by providing a recursion formula that handles the remaining cases. It expresses these character values in terms of values for $S_{n-1}$ together with values for $S_n$ that are already known in the recursive process. This provides an alternative to the Murnaghan-...

We estimate the proportion of several classes of elements in finite classical groups which are readily recognised algorithmically, and for which some power has a large fixed point subspace and acts irreducibly on a complement of it. The estimates are used in complexity analyses of new recognition algorithms for finite classical groups in arbitrary characteristic.

We give several formulas for the character of an arbitrary irreducible finite--dimensional representation for the Yangian of sl_2.

This is an essay about a certain family of elements in the general linear group GL(d,q) called primitive prime divisor elements, or ppd-elements. A classification of the subgroups of GL(d,q) which contain such elements is discussed, and the proportions of ppd-elements in GL(d,q) and the various classical groups are given. This study of ppd-elements was motivated by their importance for the design and analysis of algorithms for computing with matrix groups over finite fields. ...

We give an explicit expression of the normalized characters of the symmetric group in terms of the contents of the partition labelling the representation.

A known result for the finite general linear group $\GL(n,\FF_q)$ and for the finite unitary group $\U(n,\FF_{q^2})$ posits that the sum of the irreducible character degrees is equal to the number of symmetric matrices in the group. Fulman and Guralnick extended this result by considering sums of irreducible characters evaluated at an arbitrary conjugacy class of $\GL(n,\FF_q)$. We develop an explicit formula for the value of the permutation character of $\U(2n,\FF_{q^2})$ ov...