In order that the results of the previous section
can be generalized, one needs
to define a unitary structure on
the regular representation. This implies that
one needs a measure on
that is invariant both for left and
right translations by elements in
. The existence and essential
uniqueness of a left and
a right invariant measure is guaranteed in the case of
locally compact1 groups by a famous result of Haar.
But the requirement that the left
invariant measure is itself also right invariant is a nontrivial
condition. We call the group unimodular in this case.
Thus, given any unimodular locally compact group
,
three natural questions present themselves:
It has to be said that even in the case of finite groups
these questions are very difficult, and still open for many important
groups. It is clear that the number of irreducibles is equal to the
number of conjugacy classes in (by the Plancherel formula applied
to central functions). However, this is a duality, not a
parametrization, and there is no natural correspondence between the
conjugacy classes and the irreducibles.
The question of actually constructing the representations is even
more difficult.
In some sense the case of the circle group was already treated
in 1807 by Fourier. In his famous work on the heat equation with
periodic boundary conditions he proved the Plancherel formula for
what is now called the Fourier series of a function on a circle.
But at that time there was no recognition of the fundamental role
played by the group structure of
.
The first real progress was made in 1934 by Pontrjagin,
in the case of the
general locally compact abelian group.
This work represents a huge generalization of the theory of
Fourier series and integrals, and is a cornerstone in much of the
non-abelian theory that would be developed later.
When a group is abelian, then all its unitary
irreducible representations are one dimensional. Such irreducible
representations are called characters. We can multiply
two characters point-wise to obtain a new character.
Pontrjagin proved that this gives itself
the structure of a locally compact abelian group,
the dual group of
.
Moreover, he showed that the dual of
is
itself.
In 1940 Weil proved that the Plancherel measure on
is given
by its Haar measure, suitably normalized.
The non-abelian theory started off with the study of compact groups.
Schur himself considered already the representations of the groups
and
. The general case of a compact connected Lie
group was solved completely by Hermann Weyl in the 1920's.
Compact Lie groups were only a small first step, in some sense still
very resemblant to the case of finite groups. Serious applications in
quantum theory and number theory required however the understanding of the
representation theory of general locally compact groups.
A new key point arose from the work of Murray and Von Neumann in
the 1930's. A von Neumann algebra is a subalgebra of the algebra of
bounded operators on a Hilbert space which is closed for the weak
topology and for taking adjoints. A von Neumann algebra is called a
factor if its center consists of scalars only.
A unitary representation of
is called
factorial if the von Neumann algebra generated by
is
a factor.
Examples of factorial representations are arbitrary direct sums
of a single irreducible unitary representation.
Factorial representations of this special kind are said to
be of type I. A group is said to be
of type I when all its factorial representations are of type I.
The shocking discovery of Murray and Van Neumann was that not all
locally compact unimodular groups are of type I. A famous
counterexample is the free group
on two elements (with the
discrete topology). In general one can show that every unitary
representation of a locally compact unimodular group
has an essentially unique decomposition as a direct Hilbert
integral of factorial representations.
This does not imply the existence nor the
uniqueness of a Plancherel measure on
.
However, if we further assume that
is of type I, then
there exists a unique Plancherel measure on
describing the
decomposition of
as a unitary
representation. One can show that the ``dual''
is
metrizable and locally compact in this case.
Thus it became an important issue to decide whether a given unimodular locally compact group is of type I. Known examples of such groups are nilpotent Lie groups, certain (but not all) solvable Lie groups, reductive algebraic groups over local fields, and finally reductive groups over the adelic ring of a global field. Many mathematicians have studied the above program of three questions for these cases from the 1940's. It is of course too much to be discussed in detail here, and I will restrict myself to the case of reductive groups over local fields only.