Conjugation properties of tensor product multiplicities

Abstract

It was recently proven that the total multiplicity in the decomposition into irreducibles of the tensor product of two irreducible representations of a simple Lie algebra is invariant under conjugation of one of them; at a given level, this also applies to the fusion multiplicities of affine algebras. Here, we show that, in the case of SU(3), the lists of multiplicities, in the tensor products and , are identical up to permutations. This latter property does not hold in general for other Lie algebras. We conjecture that the same property should hold for the fusion product of the affine algebra of SU(3) at finite levels, but this is not investigated in the present paper.