The real Chevalley involution

Abstract

AbstractThe Chevalley involution of a connected, reductive algebraic group over an algebraically closed field takes every semisimple element to a conjugate of its inverse, and this involution is unique up to conjugacy. In the case of the reals we prove the existence of a real Chevalley involution, which is defined over $\mathbb{R}$, takes every semisimple element of $G(\mathbb{R})$ to a $G(\mathbb{R})$-conjugate of its inverse, and is unique up to conjugacy by $G(\mathbb{R})$. We derive some consequences, including an analysis of groups for which every irreducible representation is self-dual, and a calculation of the Frobenius Schur indicator for such groups.