Michael Field

Symmetry Breaking for Compact Lie Groups

Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society, 575, 1996.



This work comprises a general study of symmetry breaking for compact Lie groups in the context of equivariant bifurcation theory. We start by extending the theory developed by Field and Richardson [92] for absolutely irreducible representations of finite groups to general irreducible representations of compact Lie groups. In particular, we allow for branches of relative equilibria and phenomena such as the Hopf bifurcation. We also present a general theory of determinacy for irreducible Lie group actions along the lines previously described in Field [89]. In the main result of this work, we show that branching patterns for generic equivariant bifurcation problems defined on irreducible representations persist under perturbations by sufficiently high order non-equivariant terms. We give applications of this result to normal form computations yielding, for example, equivariant Hopf bifurcations and show how normal form computations of branching and stabilities are valid when we take account of the non-normalized tail.