Adjoint Chevalley group

Fix a Chevalley basis and its integral lattice. The adjoint Chevalley group over a field is generated by the root operators obtained from the integral divided-power polynomials $x_{\alpha }(t)={\sum }_j{t}^j(\mathrm{ad}{e}_{\alpha }{)}^j/j!$ on that lattice. The coefficients are first computed over the integers and then reduced to the field; factorials need not be invertible there. This is the adjoint construction; other weight lattices give other isogeny forms of groups of Lie type.

On the sl2 Lie algebra with basis $e=E_{12},h=E_{11}-E_{22},f=E_{21}$, the integral adjoint root polynomials areThese are conjugation by the upper and lower elementary matrices of the special linear group. Those matrices generate $S{L}_2(K)$, and a matrix commuting with both $E_{12}$ and $E_{21}$ is scalar. Thus the kernel is precisely $\{aI:a^2=1\}$ over every field, even in characteristic two, and the image is the displayed quotient.