Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2008/iii/paper-3/3/i/solution

Preserving the symmetric bilinear form infinitesimally means . In blocks of sizes , write as a general block matrix and multiply by the given . The condition says that is skew-symmetric. It forces the lower-right entry to be zero, the middle diagonal block to be the negative transpose of the upper-left block, and the two off-diagonal two-by-two blocks to be skew-symmetric. Thus the general element of the Special orthogonal Lie algebra is
where is an arbitrary two-by-two matrix and are arbitrary two-component columns. More explicitly, using ten independent complex parameters,
Conversely, substituting this matrix into gives zero, so there are no further restrictions. In particular .

New to topics? Read the docs here!