The Spin Group in Superspace

Abstract

There are two well-known ways of describing elements of the rotation group SO$(m)$. First, according to the Cartan-Dieudonn\'e theorem, every rotation matrix can be written as an even number of reflections. And second, they can also be expressed as the exponential of some anti-symmetric matrix. In this paper, we study similar descriptions of a group of rotations SO${}_0$ in the superspace setting. This group can be seen as the action of the functor of points of the orthosymplectic supergroup OSp$(m|2n)$ on a Grassmann algebra. While still being connected, the group SO${}_0$ is thus no longer compact. As a consequence, it cannot be fully described by just one action of the exponential map on its Lie algebra. Instead, we obtain an Iwasawa-type decomposition for this group in terms of three exponentials acting on three direct summands of the corresponding Lie algebra of supermatrices. At the same time, SO${}_0$ strictly contains the group generated by super-vector reflections. Therefore, its Lie algebra is isomorphic to a certain extension of the algebra of superbivectors. This means that the Spin group in this setting has to be seen as the group generated by the exponentials of the so-called extended superbivectors in order to cover SO${}_0$. We also study the actions of this Spin group on supervectors and provide a proper subset of it that is a double cover of SO${}_0$. Finally, we show that every fractional Fourier transform in n bosonic dimensions can be seen as an element of this spin group.