As it was mentioned in the previous post of this series, today we’re going to apply our discussions so far (about origamis, their automorphisms groups and the consequences to the study of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle) to two concrete cases: in the first part of this post we will study a family of quasi-regular origamis with automorphism group isomorphic to the symmetric group , and in the second part of this post we’ll study regular origamis with a rich representation theory (in the sense that real, complex and quaternionic representations appear at the same time inside the “interesting” part of homology of the origami).
-A family of quasi-regular origamis-
Fix an integer, and let
be group consisting of all permutations of the set
respecting its natural partition into even and odd numbers. Let
and
, so that
Define and
, where
is the set of even number in
.
Proposition.
and
generate
;
;
is the normalizer of
and
;
is a normal subgroup in
of index
.
Proof. Observe that , where
is the set of odd integers in
, so that the second item is clear. Also, it is clear that
has order 2, i.e.,
is a subgroup of index 2 of
, and hence
is normal, so that the fourth item follows. For the third item, note that
normalizes
, and, as we just saw,
is an index 2 normal subgroup of
, so that
is the normalizer of
. Finally, for the first item, one notices that
is the transposition
. On the other hand, by induction on
, one can check that
is generated by the transpositions
. Thus, by letting
vary amongst the even numbers, we obtain that the elements
generate
. Hence, since
and
has index 2 in
, we conclude that
and
generate
, that is,
and
generate
.
This proposition says that the data generates an origami
with automorphism group
. Moreover, as we saw in this previous post here, the fact that
is normal and
is Abelian is an alternative characterization of quasi-regular origamis. In other words,
is a quasi-regular origami with automorphism group
.
Remark. For the sake of comparison of with the case of regular origamis associated to
, observe that the image
of
in the automorphism group
of
is
(as, by definition, the image
of
is computed by looking at the action of
on the even numbers in
[in this case it is just the transposition
] and then renormalizing the even numbers in
[by multiplication by
] in order to get a permutation of
), and thus
is not the commutator of a pair of elements of
(as such commutators are necessarily even permutations).
Let be a representation of
. Since
has index 2 in
and
, by this previous post here, the multiplicity
of
in the interesting part
of the homology of
is given by
On the other hand, because , we have that (after considering the action only on even numbers and renormalizing by multiplication by
)
. Thus, the previous formula simplifies to
In order to render this formula more useful, we’ll briefly recall some aspects of the (very classical) representation theory of (along the lines of the classical book “Representation theory: a first course” of W. Fulton and J. Harris).
We start with the notion of Young diagrams. Given a list of integers
such that, for some
,
for
, we take
boxes and we form a (Young) diagram by arranging them in a left-justified way in a manner that the first arrow consists of
boxes, the second arrow consists of
boxes, etc. For instance, we drew below the object/diagram corresponding to
:
A natural operation on consists into taking its dual
by considering the list
. Geometrically,
is the list associated to the diagram obtained from the diagram of
after applying the reflection with respect to the anti-diagonal. For example, the dual
of
is depicted below:
It is well-known that conjugation classes of are described by the list of its cycles in non-increasing order, or, in other words, by Young diagrams associated to lists
with
. Furthermore, such Young diagrams
allow to recover all irreducible representations
of
(see Fulton and Harris’ book), and, as a matter of fact, they are all real. Below we give some fairly easy examples of this correspondence between Young diagrams and irreducible representations of
Example 1. The list corresponds to the trivial representation
.
Example 2. The dual of
corresponds to the alternating (signature) representation
.
Example 3. The list gives rise to the standard representation
(such that
is the usual permutation representation of
).
Example 4. The dual of
is the representation
obtained by taking the tensor product of the standard representation
with the alternating representation
.
Remark. In general, the representation associated to the dual of
can be obtained by taking the tensor product
of the representation
corresponding to
with the signature representation
. In particular, Examples 2 and 4 above are concrete incarnations of this general fact.
The dimension of the irreducible representation can be computed with the aid of the hook-length formula:
where is the hook length of the box of number
, that is, the number of boxes to the right in the same row of
plus the number of boxes below in the same column of
plus one (for the box itself).
In the concrete example of the list , we drew below the corresponding Young diagram and we filled each box with the number giving its hook length.
From this picture we deduce that .
Coming back to our concrete example of quasi-regular origami , we had that
where was a transposition. In particular, it follows that
.
In this formula, we already know the dimension of (thanks to the hook-formula), so that we need to know
to determine
. This is done with the aid of Frobenius formula (that we specialize to the case of a transposition
):
Frobenius formula. where
.
Observe that . Since
(by the hook-length formula) and
, we have the following corollary of Frobenius formula:
Corollary. .
Example 1′. For ,
(this is coherent with the fact that
is quasi-regular and hence the trivial representation has zero multiplicity in
).
Example 2′. By the corollary, for , we have
.
Example 5. For and
we have ,
and thus
. Also, by the corollary, for
, we have
.
Example 6. For
we have ,
and thus
. Also, by the corollary, for
, we have
.
Remark. The examples above give the multiplicities of all irreducible representations for . For
, it remains
Remark. Still concerning regular origamis associated to symmetric groups, we observe a theorem of O. Ore says that every element of
is the commutator
of two elements
in
. However, it is not obvious that, for a given
, one can choose
and
with
and
generates
or
.
-A family of regular origamis-
Let where
is prime. Note that
, and
generate whenever
.
Notations. ,
,
is a generator of
(a cyclic group of order
), and
is the subgroup of
consisting of elements with norm 1. Here, we recall that
is a degree 2 extension of
: this can be seen from the so-called Frobenius automorphism
. Also, using the Frobenius automorphism, we can define a norm
. In this language,
. Moreover, we fix
a generator of
. Finally, we think of
as a subset of
by looking at the action of
in a fixed basis
.
1. Conjugation classes in
The following table presents the information we will need about the conjugation classes of , namely, it gives representatives for each “type” of class (in the first collumn), the number of elements on each class of a given “type” (in the second collumn), and the number of classes of a given “type” (in the third collumn).
| representative | number of elements in a class | number of classes |
From this table, we see that the total number of conjugation classes is .
2. Irreducible representations
Below we list the irreducible representations of
.
a. the trivial representation .
b. the standard representation coming from the action of
on
(that is, we have a permutation representation of
that we write as
). The character
is given in the following table
c. let be a character with
(there are
possible choices of
), and let
be the usual Borel subgroup. Define the character and consider the induced representation
of
. One has
, and the character
is given in the following table
d. in the case of the character with
, the induced representation
is reducible: indeed,
. Observe that
implies that
. The characters
are given in the following tables.
For ,
and, for ,
e. let be a character with
(there are
possible choices of
). Using
it is possible to construct a representation
whose character
is given by the following table
f. let be the character with
. In this case,
is reducible: indeed,
. Observe that
implies that
. The characters
are given in the following tables.
For ,
and, for ,
In resume, the complete list of irreducible representations is:
(there are
of them)
(there are
of them)
From the previous tables of characters, one sees that
and
are real
and
take real values
are complex when
and real when
(because in this case the characters
take only real values, so that
are either real or quaternionic, and the quaternionic possibility is easily ruled out as
is odd and quaternionic representations always have even dimension)
are complex when
, and real or quaternionic when
.
In order to distinguish whether are real or quaternionic (when
), we apply the following general criterion (based on the Frobenius-Schur indicator):
Theorem. Let be a character of an irreducible representation of a finite group
. Then,
Applying this criterion (with the aid of the previous character tables), we can check that
are quaternionic when
- for
(with
),
is real when
is even, and
is quaternionic when
is odd
- for
(with
),
is real when
is even, and
is quaternionic when
is odd
In a nutshell, our discussions so far can be resumed as follows:
- for
, there are
real representations,
quaternionic representations, and
complex representations.
- for
, there are
real representations,
quaternionic representations, and
complex representations.
This concludes our quick review of the representation theory of . Now, we pass to the study of the regular origami.
Recall that we have chosen
with . Their commutator
is
and hence its trace is . The nature of the eigenvalues of
are described by the quantity
It follows that
- if
(this can only happen when
as
must be a square), then
is conjugated to
(and the order of
is
)
- if
is a square,
is conjugated to
, and the order
of
satisfies
and
- if
is not a square,
is conjugated to
, and the order
of
satisfies
and
As we saw in this post here, the genus of the regular origami
is
Also, note that
and
Finally, note that the order of can be computed by the following recurrence equation
on (with
,
). (This recurrence formula follows from the fact that
for
).
For the first values of , one gets the following tables (where below
is the Legendre symbol).
For :
For :
For :
For :
In the case of and
(parabolic), one can use the character tables above (and the fact that, as
has order
,
) to deduce that
and hence
Of course, while this give the multiplicities of all irreducible representations in the interesting part of the homology of the regular origami associated to
when
and
), there are several interesting questions left open here: for instance, what are the signatures of the Hermitian forms associated to the quaternionic representations
, and
(when
and
for
odd)?
It is likely that some of these questions will be dealt with in the forthcoming paper (by C.M., J.-C. Yoccoz and D. Zmiaikou), but J.-C. Yoccoz decided to stop here the comments on this project, so that the first “part” of the course ends now.
Next time, we will discuss simplicity of Lyapunov exponents of the Kontsevich-Zorich cocycle (along the lines of the works of A. Avila and M. Viana) in “general”, and then later we will restrict this discussion to the setting of square-tiled surfaces (by following the lines of a work in progress by C.M., M. Moeller and J.-C. Yoccoz).








Recent Comments