Generalizations Of The Cartan And Iwasawa Decompositions For SL$_2(k)$

Abstract

The Cartan and Iwasawa decompositions of real reductive Lie groups play a fundamental role in the representation theory of the groups and their corresponding symmetric spaces. These decompositions are defined by an involution with a compact fixed-point group, called a Cartan involution. For an arbitrary involution, one can consider similar decompositions. We offer a generalization of the Cartan and Iwasawa decompositions for algebraic groups defined over an arbitrary field $k$ and a general involution.