Representations of Semidirect Products of Abelian Groups

Jonathan Siegel April 18, 2013

The goal of this article is to describe the irreducible representations of G = A B where both A and B are abelian. For the remainder of the article denote the action of B on A by b a. Additionally, let 1 , ..., n denote the characters (all one-dimensional) of B and let 1 , ..., k denote the characters of A (|A| = k and |B | = n). Note that since B is a quotient of G we can inate all of the irreducible characters of B to G. This gives us n linear irreducible characters of G. The more dicult part is nding the remaining irreducible representations of G. Notice however, that A G, B G, and AB = G, hence in order to describe a representation of G we only need a representation of A, and a representation of B which are compatible (since knowing the matricies associated to the elements of A G and the elements of B G uniquely determine the matricies associated to each element of G = AB ). Now we need to understand what it means for two representations of A and B to be compatible. The additional relations between elements of A and B which are introduced in the semi-direct product are the relations of the form bab1 = b a. These same relations must hold between the matricies associated to a and b. Hence two representations : A M atn and : B M atk are compatible i n = k and for all pairs a A and b B we have (b)(a) (b)1 = (b a). In this case the two representations combine into a representation of the semi-direct product. Note that if we let be the trivial representation of A and any linear character of B then we obtain the representations coming from ination. By restricting the representation of G to each of the subgroups A and B we see that every representation of G comes from two compatible representations of A and B . Everything in the previous paragraph holds for arbitrary semi-direct products. However, in the case where both A and B are abelian we can use the ideas of the previous paragraph to easily construct all of the irreducible representations of G. The key is to consider the action of B on the irreducible characters of a given by b (a) = (b a). Let S1 , ..., Sr be the decomposition of the set of irreducible characters of A into orbits under B . Now consider the action of B on each Sj which is now transitive. Since B is abelian we know that the stabilizer of every point is equal so for each j let Bj B be the kernel of action of B on Aj . Then B/Bj acts on Sj in such a way that every non-identity element has no xed points. Now we can construct the irreducible representation of G. I will dene two compatible representations of A and B and show that the resulting representation of G is irreducible. So for each pair (Sj , ) where Sj is an orbit and is a 1

character of Bj dene the two representations : A M atl and : B M atl (l = |Sj |) by i1 (a) 0 ... 0 0 i2 (a) . . . 0 (a) = . . . . . . . . . . . . 0 0 . . . il (a) where it are the elements of Sj and (b) = (b)P (b) where is a character of B which resticts to on Bj (always exists since B is abelian) and P (b) is the permutation matrix associated to the action of b on Sj (with respect to the ordering i1 , ..., il ). One can easily check that these representations are compatible (essentially this follows since conjugating a diagonal matrix with a permutation matrix simply permutes the elements on the diagonal). We can additionally compute the character of the combination of these representations on G. Letting denote this character, we easily see that (ab) = 0 if b / Bj and (ab) = (b)l j =1 ij (a) if b Bj . Now we can compute |G|(, ). l 1 )) which equals We will get bBj (b)(b)aA (l j =1 ij (a))(j =1 ij (a l l |Bj | (, ) |A| (j =1 ij , j =1 ij ) = |Bj | |A| l = |G| since and each are irreducible characters and |Bj | l = |B | by the stabilizer-orbit formula. This proves that the representations we have dened are irreducible. Moreover, all of them have dierent characters so they are all distinct. Now I will show that we have found all irreducible characters by summing the squares of their dimensions. We get j |Sj |2 |Bj | since there are |Bj | dierent characters of Bj (Bj is abelian) and thus for each Sj we have constructed |Bj | dierent characters of dimension |Sj |. Using |Sj | |Bj | = B (again the stabilizer-orbit formula) we get |B |j |Sj | = |B ||A| = |G|. Hence we have constructed all irreducible representations of G and in particular recovered its character table.