Symmetry breaking operators for line bundles over real projective spaces

Abstract

The space of smooth sections of an equivariant line bundle over the real projective space $\mathbb{R}{\rm P}^n$ forms a natural representation of the group ${\rm GL}(n+1,\mathbb{R})$. We explicitly construct and classify all intertwining operators between such representations of ${\rm GL}(n+1,\mathbb{R})$ and its subgroup ${\rm GL}(n,\mathbb{R})$, intertwining for the subgroup. Intertwining operators of this form are called symmetry breaking operators, and they describe the occurrence of a representation of ${\rm GL}(n,\mathbb{R})$ inside the restriction of a representation of ${\rm GL}(n+1,\mathbb{R})$. In this way, our results contribute to the study of branching problems for the real reductive pair $({\rm GL}(n+1,\mathbb{R}),{\rm GL}(n,\mathbb{R}))$. The analogous classification is carried out for intertwining operators between algebraic sections of line bundles, where the Lie group action of ${\rm GL}(n,\mathbb{R})$ is replaced by the action of its Lie algebra $\mathfrak{gl}(n,\mathbb{R})$, and it turns out that all intertwining operators arise as restrictions of operators between smooth sections.