McKay trees

Abstract

Given a finite group $G$ and its representation $\rho$, the corresponding McKay graph is a graph $\Gamma(G,\rho)$ whose vertices are the irreducible representations of $G$; the number of edges between two vertices $\pi,\tau$ of $\Gamma(G,\rho)$ is $dim Hom_G(\pi \otimes \rho, \tau) $. The collection of all McKay graphs for a given group $G$ encodes, in a sense, its character table. Such graphs were also used by McKay to provide a bijection between the finite subgroups of $SU(2)$ and the affine Dynkin diagrams of types $A, D, E$, the bijection given by considering the appropriate McKay graphs. In this paper, we classify all (undirected) trees which are McKay graphs of finite groups and describe the corresponding pairs $(G,\rho)$; this classification turns out to be very concise. Moreover, we give a partial classification of McKay graphs which are forests, and construct some non-trivial examples of such forests.