The bounded spherical functions for the free two step nilpotent Lie group

Abstract

In this paper, we give the expressions for the bounded spherical functions, or equivalently the spherical functions of positive type, for the free two-step nilpotent Lie groups endowed with the actions of orthogonal groups or their special subgroups. Next we deduce some results about the (Kohn) sub-Laplacian, and we compute the radial Plancherel measure.