Saturation and Irredundancy for Spin(8)

Michael Kapovich, Shrawan Kumar, John J. Millson

Published 2006-07-19Version 1

We explicitly calculate the triangle inequalities for the group PSO(8). Therefore we explicitly solve the eigenvalues of sum problem for this group (equivalently describing the side-lengths of geodesic triangles in the corresponding symmetric space for the Weyl chamber-valued metric). We then apply some computer programs to verify two basic questions/conjectures. First, we verify that the above system of inequalities is irredundant. Then, we verify the ``saturation conjecture'' for the decomposition of tensor products of finite-dimensional irreducible representations of Spin(8). Namely, we show that for any triple of dominant weights a, b, c such that a+b+c is in the root lattice, and any positive integer N, the tensor product of the irreducible representations V(a) and V(b) contains V(c) if and only if the tensor product of V(Na) and V(Nb) contains V(Nc).