Background on Chevalley Groups Constructed from a Root System
Background on Chevalley Groups Constructed from a Root System Paul Tokorcheck Department of Mathematics University of California, Santa Cruz 10 October 2011 Abstract In 1955, Claude Chevalley described a construction which begins with the root sys- tem of a complex, semisimple Lie algebra g, and yields a corresponding Lie group G which has g as its Lie algebra. His method was improved by Robert Steinberg in 1959. In the cases An, Bn, Cn, and Dn, this method gives the simply connected groups SLn+1, Spin2n+1, Sp2n, and Spin2n, respectively. However, this method can also be used to more easily define the exceptional Lie groups, the analogous groups over arbitrary fields, or even over commutative rings. Such groups, like SLn(Fq) or G2(Qp), fall under the blanket term ’groups of Lie type’. 1 Background Historically, the identification of many abstract simple groups was done via a careful consideration of simple complex Lie groups. For example, if one defines the group SL2(C) to be the group of two-by-two matrices of determinant one, then the field C may be easily replaced by any field or commutative ring (with identity) without alteration of the definition. But many other groups, which were known (at least formally) to exist via an association to a Lie algebra or root system, failed to admit such a simple definition. Theoretically, all such algebraic groups can be considered as subgroups of GLn satisfying some polynomial conditions on the entries, though the size of n and the nature of the polynomial conditions 1 proved to be elusive.
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