Branching problems for unitary representations, July 25-29, 2011

Workshop Website: http://www.aimath.org/ARCC/workshops/repnbranching.html [4]

This workshop, sponsored by AIM [5], MPIM [6], and the NSF [7], will focus on branching laws for the restriction of a unitary representation to a subgroup.

The central problem of the workshop will be to find explicit branching laws. If the representations are discretely decomposable, then the explicit branching laws are often of a combinatorial nature. Here techniques from algebraic combinatorics will be extremely important and many interesting combinatorial problems should arise.

Another goal is elucidate the connection between the real and the p-adic situation. and to analyze how different methods in the real and p-adic case might lead to (conjecturally) similar phenomena. This pertains in particular to the branching laws with discrete spectrum.

The workshop will differ from typical conferences in some regards. Participants will be invited to suggest open problems and questions before the workshop begins, and these will be posted on the workshop website [4]. These include specific problems on which there is hope of making some progress during the workshop, as well as more ambitious problems which may influence the future activity of the field. Lectures at the workshop will be focused on familiarizing the participants with the background material leading up to specific problems, and the schedule will include discussion and parallel working sessions.

The deadline to apply for funding to particpate in this workshop has passed.