Reduction of Symmetry in Quaternionic Analysis and Invariant Trilinear Forms

Abstract

In our previous papers we repeatedly emphasized the special role in Quaternionic Analysis of the conformal group SU(2,2) and other real forms of its complexification SL(4,C). In particular, the natural product map of the left and right regular functions into a larger representation that contains the doubly regular functions as a subquotient is an intertwining operator. In this paper we show, however, that the spaces of regular and doubly regular functions do not "interact" - there is no invariant trilinear form on the tensor product of these representations. To construct a natural invariant trilinear form, we reduce the conformal group symmetry to the symplectic subgroup Sp(4,R). This suggests a new approach to the Quaternionic Analysis in general, and we make the first steps in this paper. It turns out that the spaces of regular and doubly regular functions are still irreducible after the restriction to the symplectic subgroup and have a composed structure arising from the metaplectic representation of the double cover of Sp(4,R) - the metaplectic group. This also leads us to consider the double covers of the quaternionic spaces and non-trivial pairings between them. Our study of Quaternionic Analysis based on the symplectic symmetry group culminates in the construction of the invariant trilinear forms on the products of spaces of doubly regular functions and certain counterparts of regular and quasi regular functions. Additional motivation for constructing invariant trilinear forms comes from their application to spinor representations of certain quaternionic algebras based on the doubly regular functions. The latter can be viewed as the space of solutions of the Maxwell equation, and their spinor representations are of a great importance to quantum field theory. These spinor representations will be the subject of a forthcoming paper.