How do I work with the character tables of Weyl groups in Sage to compute restrictions to parabolic subgroups?

asked 11 years ago

Stephen gravatar image

updated 10 years ago

FrédéricC gravatar image

The question is essentially what is in the title. To be more concrete, let's start with the Weyl group of type E6. This contains a parabolic subgroup of type D5. I know how to look at the character tables of these groups using sage: for instance

W=WeylGroup(["E",6]); ctE6=W.character_table(); ctE6

and I can do the same thing with D5, of course. Also, I can realize D5 as the subgroup of W generated by five of the simple reflections. The problem is that I don't know how to get Sage to tell me which elements are in the conjugacy class (for example) labelled 6b in the E6 table---all I know about this class is that it consists of elements of order 6. For my purposes, I really need to know which elements these are, in matrix form, so that I can restrict the characters to D5 and expand the result there in terms of irreducible D5 characters.

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