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Products of Reflections in the Group SO*(2n)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Dragomir Ž. Djoković  and
Jerry Malzan
Dragomir Ž. Djoković
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Jerry Malzan
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario
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Let SO*(2n) be the group of quaternionic n × n matrices A satisfying A*JA = J, where J is a fixed skew-hermitian invertible matrix. An element R ∊ SO*(2n) is called a reflection if R2 = In and R — In has rank one. We assume that n ≧ 2, in which case S*(2n) is generated by reflections. The length of A ∊ SO*(2n) is the smallest integer k(≧0) such that A can be written as A = R1R2 … Rk where R1, …, Rk are reflections. In this paper, for each A ∊ SO*(2n), we compute its length l(A). Set r(A) = rank (A — In). Already in Section 3 we are able to show that the difference δ = l(A) – r(A) can take only three values 0, 1, or 2. The remainder of the paper deals with the problem of separating these three possibilities. The main results are stated in Section 4 and proved in Section 6. The intermediate Section 5 consists of a sequence of lemmas which are needed for the proof. Clearly l(A) depends only on the conjugacy class of A and the main results in Section 4 are stated in terms of conjugacy classes. For the description of conjugacy classes in SO*(2n) we refer the reader to [1]. The present paper relies heavily on our previous paper [5] where the analogous problem was solved for the groups U(p, q). It is worth remarking that only the various lemmas from that paper were used but not the main theorem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Mathematics , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , 01 April 1984 , pp. 300 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Mathematical Society 1984

References

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