Past exam of the groups and representations course of the University of Oxford 2018 2 c Solution 2026-10-25
The axis is an invariant subspace on which acts as and as . The plane carries the irreducible representation from b. ThusThe character of a tensor product is the product of the characters, so . Weighted character inner products giveFor the trivial character, the multiplicity is . For any other one-dimensional character, the weighted sum over the nonidentity classes is , giving . For , it is .
Equivalently, is the sum of all four one-dimensional representations, and tensoring by gives the same two-dimensional irreducible representation. The dimensions in the boxed decomposition sum to nine, as required.