Low degree representations of simple Lie groups

Abstract

We give upper bounds for the number of irreducible representations of dimension at most n for a compact semisimple Lie group. In particular, we prove that there are at most n irreducible representations of dimension at most n for a simple compact Lie group. We use this prove that the number of conjugacy classes of maximal subgroups of a compact simple Lie group is O(r) where r is the Lie rank. We also give a short proof that the dimensions of the weight spaces of a maximal torus are small relative to the dimension of an irreducible module.