Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-lie-groups-and-differentiable-manifolds-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2008/a/2/c/solution

Write and . A root is a nonzero weight of the adjoint action. Its root space is
At the group level these weights come from nontrivial characters of the Cartan subgroup acting by conjugation. The Cartan root-space decomposition is
The zero-weight space is ; for the complexification of a compact group the algebra is reductive, with any centre contained in this zero-weight space.
For the product in question,
Take the diagonal Cartan subalgebra generated by and . On , define and . The roots are exactly
If and , their four root spaces are respectively , , , and . These four lines and the two-dimensional diagonal subalgebra form the full six-dimensional decomposition. There are no mixed roots: the two direct summands commute. This is the root system .

New to topics? Read the docs here!