On the characters of the Weyl group of type D

Abstract

This paper is a continuation of (2), (3) in the development of a unified theory of the characters of the Weyl groups of the simple Lie algebras using their common structure as reflection groups; compare Carter (1) for a similar development for the conjugacy classes. We look at the Weyl group of type D, which is a subgroup of index two in the Weyl group of type C. It was first studied by Young (4), but rather less is known about the characters of this group than those of types A and C. Indeed, the situation is rather more complicated, but we are able to give, as before, an algorithm to determine irreducible constituents of the principal character of a Weyl subgroup induced up to the whole group. We shall also study the case where the rank of the Weyl group is even, when extra irreducible characters may arise, and after constructing these, we shall state some results on their occurrence in the induced principal character.