Down-up Algebras

Georgia Benkart, Tom Roby

Published 1998-03-12Version 1

The algebra generated by the down and up operators on a differential partially ordered set (poset) encodes essential enumerative and structural properties of the poset. Motivated by the algebras generated by the down and up operators on posets, we introduce here a family of infinite-dimensional associative algebras called down-up algebras. We show that down-up algebras exhibit many of the important features of the universal enveloping algebra $U(\fsl)$ of the Lie algebra $\fsl$ including a Poincar\'e-Birkhoff-Witt type basis and a well-behaved representation theory. We investigate the structure and representations of down-up algebras and focus especially on Verma modules, highest weight representations, and category $\mathcal O$ modules for them. We calculate the exact expressions for all the weights, since that information has proven to be particularly useful in determining structural results about posets.