Constructions of Representations of Rank Two Semisimple Lie Algebras with Distributive Lattices

Abstract

We associate one or two posets (which we call "semistandard posets") to any given irreducible representation of a rank two semisimple Lie algebra over ${\Bbb C}$. Elsewhere we have shown how the distributive lattices of order ideals taken from semistandard posets (we call these "semistandard lattices") can be used to obtain certain information about these irreducible representations. Here we show that some of these semistandard lattices can be used to present explicit actions of Lie algebra generators on weight bases (Theorem 5.1), which implies these particular semistandard lattices are supporting graphs. Our descriptions of these actions are explicit in the sense that relative to the bases obtained, the entries for the representing matrices of certain Lie algebra generators are rational coefficients we assign in pairs to the lattice edges. In Theorem 4.4 we show that if such coefficients can be assigned to the edges, then the assignment is unique up to products; we conclude that the associated weight bases enjoy certain uniqueness and extremal properties (the "solitary" and "edge-minimal" properties respectively). Our proof of this result is uniform and combinatorial in that it depends only on certain properties possessed by all semistandard posets. For certain families of semistandard lattices some of these results were obtained in previous papers; in Proposition 5.6 we explicitly construct new weight bases for a certain family of rank two symplectic representations. These results are used to help obtain in Theorem 5.1 the classification of those semistandard lattices which are supporting graphs.