Unitary Group - Generalizations

Generalizations

From the point of view of Lie theory, the classical unitary group is a real form of the Steinberg group, which is an algebraic group that arises from the combination of the diagram automorphism of the general linear group (reversing the Dynkin diagram A_n, which corresponds to transpose inverse) and the field automorphism of the extension C/R (namely complex conjugation). Both these automorphisms are automorphisms of the algebraic group, have order 2, and commute, and the unitary group is the fixed points of the product automorphism, as an algebraic group. The classical unitary group is a real form of this group, corresponding to the standard Hermitian form Ψ, which is positive definite.

This can be generalized in a number of ways:

• generalizing to other Hermitian forms yields indefinite unitary groups U(p,q);
• the field extension can be replaced by any degree 2 separable algebra, most notably a degree 2 extension of a finite field;
• generalizing to other diagrams yields other groups of Lie type, namely the other Steinberg groups (in addition to ) and Suzuki-Ree groups

• considering a generalized unitary group as an algebraic group, one can take its points over various algebras.