Casimir elements from the Brauer-Schur-Weyl duality

Abstract

We consider Casimir elements for the orthogonal and symplectic Lie algebras constructed with the use of the Brauer algebra. We calculate the images of these elements under the Harish-Chandra isomorphism and thus show that they (together with the Pfaffian-type element in the even orthogonal case) are algebraically independent generators of the centers of the corresponding universal enveloping algebras.