Why is the Lie algebra of a group special, and why is the adjoint useful?

102 Views Asked by At

I'm reading this paper for an introduction to Lie theory, and I'm having trouble understanding the point of the adjoint matrix. But I have a few questions leading up to it.

What makes the Lie algebra of a group, $T_{\epsilon}\mathcal{M}$, special compared to other tangent spaces $T_{\mathcal{X}}\mathcal{M}$ of the group? In other words, what can you do in the Lie algebra that you can't do in another tangent space?

I understand the derivation if $Ad_{\mathcal{X}}$ but I don't fully understand why there needs to be a mapping $^{\mathcal{X}}\tau \mapsto ^{\epsilon}\tau$ to begin with.

Thanks for reading!

EDIT: I've made the question more focused.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On

Suppose $g\in G$. What is the difference between $T_e G$ and $T_g G$? Well, since inversion and left multiplication by $g$ are smooth, we have linear maps $dL_g:T_e G\to T_g G$ and $dL_{g^{-1}}:T_g G\to T_e G$, and since $g*g^{-1}=e$ these maps re invertible. So each tangent space has a canonical isomorphism to the tangent space at the identity.

Now you might object: the point of manifolds is that we're going to look at vector fields, not just vectors at a point. That is, identifying the tangent spaces doesn't (immediately) help us understand the tangent bundle.

Well, if you give me a vector field $V$ on $G$, I can make new vector fields $gV_{gp} = dL_g(V_p)$ for every element $g\in G$. If $G$ were finite, we could take the average of all of these and get a new vector field, which you can check is left-invariant, i.e., multiplying on the left by any $g\in G$ leaves the vector field unchanged. If $G$ is not finite, but is compact, there is a tool called the Haar measure which you can use to integrate over G and obtain the average. It turns out the left-invariant vector fields on $G$ really captures most (all?) of the information that considering all vector fields does.

So, one tends to work in $T_e G$ and use the left actions to move around and study the local structure, and use the averaging technique to capture the global structure.