Representations of Compact Right Topological Groups

Abstract

AbstractCompact right topological groups arise naturally as the enveloping semigroups of distal flows. Recently, John Pym and the author established the existence of Haar measure μ on such groups, which invites the consideration of the regular representations. We start here by characterizing the continuous representations of a compact right topological group G, and are led to the conclusion that the right regular representation r is not continuous (unless G is topological). The domain of the left regular representation l is generally taken to be the topological centreor a tractable subgroup of it, furnished with a topology stronger than the relative topology from G (the goals being to have l both defined and continuous). An analysis of l and r on H = L2(G) for some non-topological compact right topological groups G shows, among other things, that: (i)for the simplest (perhaps) G generated by ℤ, (l, H) decomposes into one copy of each irreducible representation of ℤ and c copies of the regular representation.(ii)for the simplest (perhaps) G generated by the euclidean group of the plane , (l, H) decomposes into one copy of each of the continuous one-dimensional representations of and c copies of each continuous irreducible representation Ua,a > 0.(iii)when Λ(G) is not dense in G, it can seem very reasonable to regard r as a continuous representation of a related compact topological group, and also, G can be almost completely "lost" in the measure space (G, μ).