English

The Spin Group in Superspace

Group Theory 2019-08-27 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

There are two well-known ways of describing elements of the rotation group SO(m)(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 SO0{}_0 in the superspace setting. This group can be seen as the action of the functor of points of the orthosymplectic supergroup OSp(m2n)(m|2n) on a Grassmann algebra. While still being connected, the group SO0{}_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, SO0{}_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 SO0{}_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 SO0{}_0. Finally, we show that every fractional Fourier transform in n bosonic dimensions can be seen as an element of this spin group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.00963,
  title  = {The Spin Group in Superspace},
  author = {Hennie De Schepper and Alí Guzmán Adán and Frank Sommen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.00963},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

28 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:12:40.144Z