Tube domain and an orbit of a complex triangular group

Abstract

Let w be a complex symmetric matrix of order r, and Δ1(w), . . . , Δr(w) the principal minors of w. If w belongs to the Siegel right half-space, then it is known that Re (Δk(w)/Δk-1(w)) > 0 for k = 1, . . . , r. In this paper we study this property in three directions. First we show that this holds for general symmetric right half-spaces. Second we present a series of non-symmetric right half-spaces with this property. We note that case-by-case verifications up to dimension 10 tell us that there is only one such irreducible non-symmetric tube domain. The proof of the property reduces to two lemmas. One is entirely generalized to non-symmetric cases as we prove in this paper. This is the third direction. As a byproduct of our study, we show that the basic relative invariants associated to a homogeneous regular open convex cone Ω studied earlier by the first author are characterized as the irreducible factors of the determinant of right multiplication operators in the complexification of the clan associated to Ω.