Harmonic analysis on nilmanifolds

Abstract

We compute, using a device of A. Weil, an explicit decomposition of <inline-formula content-type="math/mathml"> <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" alttext="upper L squared"> <mml:semantics> <mml:mrow class="MJX-TeXAtom-ORD"> <mml:msup> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> <mml:annotation encoding="application/x-tex">{L^2}</mml:annotation> </mml:semantics> </mml:math> </inline-formula> of a nilmanifold into irreducible translation-invariant subspaces. The results refine previous work of C. C. Moore and L. Green.