The separating variety for the basic representations of the additive group

Emilie Dufresne*, Martin Kohls

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

For a group G acting on an affine variety X, the separating variety is the closed subvariety of X × X encoding which points of X are separated by invariants. We concentrate on the indecomposable rational linear representations V n of dimension n + 1 of the additive group of a field of characteristic zero, and decompose the separating variety into the union of irreducible components. We show that if n is odd, divisible by four, or equal to two, the closure of the graph of the action, which has dimension n + 2, is the only component of the separating variety. In the remaining cases, there is a second irreducible component of dimension n + 1. We conclude that in these cases, there are no polynomial separating algebras.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)269-280
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Algebra
Volume377
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2013

Keywords

  • Basic actions
  • Invariant theory
  • Locally nilpotent derivations
  • Separating invariants
  • Weitzenböck derivations

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