Spectral reconstruction and representations of finitely generated groups

Abstract

It is well-known that characters classify linear representations of finite groups, that is if characters of two representations of a finite group are the same, these representations are equivalent. It is also well-known that, in general, this is not true for representations of infinite groups, even if they are finitely generated. The goal of this paper is to establish a characterization of representations of finitely generated groups in terms of projective joint spectra. This approach has a clear advantage compared to character classification as it is valid for a much wider family of groups and for both finite and infinite dimensional representations. The main tool in establishing our spectral characterization is a reconstruction of an operator acting on a separable Hilbert space from the proper projective joint spectrum of the quadruple containing this operator along with a certain triple of bounded operators acting on the same space.