March 9, 2010 15:50 WSPC/251-CM 1793-7442 S1793744210000132 Confluentes Mathematici, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010) 37–134 c World Scientific Publishing Company DOI: 10.1142/S1793744210000132 SEMIBOUNDED REPRESENTATIONS AND INVARIANT CONES IN INFINITE DIMENSIONAL LIE ALGEBRAS KARL-HERMANN NEEB Fachbereich Mathematik, TU Darmstadt Schlossgartenstrasse 7, 64289-Darmstadt, Germany
[email protected] Received 23 November 2009 Revised 16 December 2009 A unitary representation of a, possibly infinite dimensional, Lie group G is called semi- bounded if the corresponding operators idπ(x) from the derived representations are uniformly bounded from above on some non-empty open subset of the Lie algebra g. In the first part of the present paper we explain how this concept leads to a fruitful interaction between the areas of infinite dimensional convexity, Lie theory, symplec- tic geometry (momentum maps) and complex analysis. Here open invariant cones in Lie algebras play a central role and semibounded representations have interesting con- nections to C∗-algebras which are quite different from the classical use of the group C∗-algebra of a finite dimensional Lie group. The second half is devoted to a detailed discussion of semibounded representations of the diffeomorphism group of the circle, the Virasoro group, the metaplectic representation on the bosonic Fock space and the spin representation on fermionic Fock space. Keywords: Infinite dimensional Lie group; unitary representation; momentum map; momentum set; semibounded representation; metaplectic representation; spin represen- tation; Virasoro algebra. AMS Subject Classification: 22E65, 22E45 Contents 1. Introduction 39 2. Semi-Equicontinuous Convex Sets 45 3. Infinite Dimensional Lie Groups 49 4.