Some regular symmetric pairs

Abstract

In [AG2] we explored the question what symmetric pairs are Gelfand pairs. We introduced the notion of regular symmetric pair and conjectured that all symmetric pairs are regular. This conjecture would imply that many symmetric pairs are Gelfand pairs, and in particular that any connected symmetric pair over C is a Gelfand pair. In this paper we show that the pairs $$(GL(V),O(V)), (GL(V),U(V)), (U(V),O(V)), (O(V \oplus W),O(V) \times O(W)), (U(V \oplus W),U(V) \times U(W))$$ are regular where V and W are quadratic or hermitian spaces over arbitrary local field of characteristic zero. We deduce from that that the pairs $(GL_n(\C),O_n(\C))$ and $(O_{n+m}(\C),O_n(\C) \times O_m(\C))$ are Gelfand pairs.