Back to Departmental Colloquium: Spring 2001
Departmental Colloquium
Date: Thursday, Feb 15, 2001
Time: 4:15PM
Location: JWB 335
Dan Barbasch
Cornell
Title |
Some functorial properties of the unitary dual |
Abstract |
Unitary representations of reductive groups play a role in many branches of mathematics such as automorphic forms, analysis and mathematical physics. The classification of the irreducible unitary dual is a basic problem of representation theory which is still far from being solved. One of the basic philosophies is that the unitary dual should be parametrized by the orbits of a group on some space. On the one hand there is the “orbit method” (initiated by Kirillov) which parametrizes the unitary dual in terms of coadjoint orbits. On the other hand, conjectures of Arthur about the residual spectrum suggest that the unitary dual should be parametrized in terms of orbits in the dual group. In this talk I will illustrate some of these ideas in the context of the spherical dual which is easier to describe. |
Representation Theory