Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-lie-algebras-course-of-part-c-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2023/3/d/solution

Use the standard structural fact that is a semisimple Lie algebra over an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero. If is a Cartan subalgebra, part (a)(ii) gives , and is an abelian Lie algebra. Part (c) therefore shows that its weight spaces occur as pairs of one-dimensional spaces, with no zero weight space.
Choose representatives of its nonzero weights of a representation. Pick in and in , scaling so that . Part (b) shows that all other pairings among different pairs are zero. Each individual weight space is one-dimensional and the bilinear form is alternating, so the ordered basis
is a symplectic basis. Every is a diagonal matrix in this basis, with entries .
Let be the Lie subalgebra consisting of all diagonal matrices
Each such matrix lies in the symplectic Lie algebra and commutes with . Hence
and . In particular, every Cartan subalgebra has dimension ; the are a basis of .
Carry out the same construction for , obtaining a symplectic basis with . The unique linear map sending to and to is invertible and preserves all pairings of basis vectors. By bilinearity, it preserves on all of , so belongs to the symplectic group . The change of basis gives
Thus conjugacy of Cartan subalgebras of the symplectic Lie algebra follows by explicitly matching their symplectic bases. If , the Lie algebra is zero and the same conclusion holds with the identity on the zero vector space.

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