Bruhat Decomposition

In mathematics, the Bruhat decomposition (introduced by François Bruhat for classical groups and by Claude Chevalley in general) $G=BWB$ of certain algebraic groups $G=BWB$ into cells can be regarded as a general expression of the principle of Gauss–Jordan elimination, which generically writes a matrix as a product of an upper triangular and lower triangular matrices—but with exceptional cases. It is related to the Schubert cell decomposition of flag varieties: see Weyl group for this.

More generally, any group with a (''B'', ''N'') pair has a Bruhat decomposition.

Definitions

*$G$ is a connected, reductive algebraic group over an algebraically closed field.
*$B$ is a Borel subgroup of $G$
*$W$ is a Weyl group of $G$ corresponding to a maximal torus of $B$.

The Bruhat decomposition of $G$ is the decomposition
:$G=BWB =\bigsqcup_BwB$
of $G$ as a disjoint union of double cosets of $B$ parameterized by the elements of the Weyl group $W$. (Note that although $W$ is not in general a subgroup of $G$, the coset $wB$ is still well defined because the maximal torus is contained in $B$.)

Examples

Let $G$ be the general linear group GL_''n'' of invertible $n \times n$ matrices with entries in some algebraically closed field, which is a reductive group. Then the Weyl group $W$ is isomorphic to the symmetric group $S_n$ on $n$ letters, with permutation matrices as representatives. In this case, we can take $B$ to be the subgroup of upper triangular invertible matrices, so Bruhat decomposition says that one can write any invertible matrix $A$ as a product $U_1PU_2$ where $U_1$ and $U_2$ are upper triangular, and $P$ is a permutation matrix. Writing this as $P=U_^AU_^$, this says that any invertible matrix can be transformed into a permutation matrix via a series of row and column operations, where we are only allowed to add row $i$ (resp. column $i$) to row $j$ (resp. column $j$) if $i>j$ (resp. i). The row operations correspond to $U_^$, and the column operations correspond to $U_^$.

The special linear group SL_''n'' of invertible $n \times n$ matrices with determinant $1$ is a semisimple group, and hence reductive. In this case, $W$ is still isomorphic to the symmetric group $S_n$. However, the determinant of a permutation matrix is the sign of the permutation, so to represent an odd permutation in SL_''n'', we can take one of the nonzero elements to be $-1$ instead of $1$. Here $B$ is the subgroup of upper triangular matrices with determinant $1$, so the interpretation of Bruhat decomposition in this case is similar to the case of GL_''n''.

Geometry

The cells in the Bruhat decomposition correspond to the Schubert cell decomposition of flag varieties. The dimension of the cells corresponds to the length of the word $w$ in the Weyl group. Poincaré duality constrains the topology of the cell decomposition, and thus the algebra of the Weyl group; for instance, the top dimensional cell is unique (it represents the fundamental class), and corresponds to the longest element of a Coxeter group.

Computations

The number of cells in a given dimension of the Bruhat decomposition are the coefficients of the $q$-polynomialThis Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, Week 186
/ref> of the associated Dynkin diagram.

Double Bruhat cells

With two opposite Borel subgroups, one may intersect the Bruhat cells for each of them, giving a further decomposition
$G=\bigsqcup_ ( Bw_1 B \cap B_- w_2 B_- ).$

See also

* Lie group decompositions
* Birkhoff factorization, a special case of the Bruhat decomposition for affine groups.
* Cluster algebra

Notes

References

* Borel, Armand. Linear Algebraic Groups (2nd ed.). New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991. .
* Bourbaki, Nicolas, ''Lie Groups and Lie Algebras: Chapters 4–6 (Elements of Mathematics)'', Springer-Verlag, 2008. {{isbn, 3-540-42650-7

Lie groups
Algebraic groups
Bruhat family