STEPWISE SQUARE INTEGRABLE REPRESENTATIONS FOR LOCALLY NILPOTENT LIE GROUPS

Abstract

In a recent paper we found conditions for a nilpotent Lie group N to have a filtration by normal subgroups whose successive quotients have square integrable representations, and such that these square integrable representations fit together nicely to give an explicit construction of Plancherel for almost all representations of N. The prototype for this sort of group is the group of upper triangular real matrices with 1’s down the diagonal. More generally, this class of groups contains the nilradicals of minimal parabolic subgroups of all (finite-dimensional) reductive real or complex Lie groups, in other words, all groups N in Iwasawa decompositions of reductive real or complex Lie groups.