B2 spin crystal 2026-10-14
For the B2 root system with long and short, the spin fundamental weight is . Its four-dimensional highest-weight representation has the minuscule weight orbit , each of multiplicity one. The crystal basis is the chain , where signs denote the coordinates. Each Kashiwara operator subtracts its indicated simple root; the sl2 Lie algebra strings have length one. This fixes every edge and gives a connected highest-weight graph with the correct character.
By dominant root-lattice highest weights have zero weight, a minuscule weight in the root lattice has zero in its Weyl group orbit. Since every element of the Weyl group is invertible, the highest weight must itself be zero. Thus equality of the weight lattice and root lattice rules out every nontrivial minuscule representation without requiring a classification of root systems.
Use directed color- edges for the Kashiwara operator , so every edge subtracts from the weight. The defining crystal of the defining odd-orthogonal representation is
The defining module has highest weight and precisely these five weights, all of multiplicity one. The color-two string through zero has length two, since . The other indicated strings have length one. Restriction to each simple-root sl2 Lie algebra and the root-string property of a crystal justify the edges; no other weight difference is the relevant simple root.
For the B2 spin crystal , denote the four weights by their sign pairs. Its graph is
The fundamental weight is a minuscule weight: its pairings with all positive coroots are zero or one. Its Weyl orbit has four weights, and the dimension formula gives four, so each occurs once and there are no additional weights. All simple-root strings have length one. Subtracting or where another weight is present gives exactly this graph.
For the B2 adjoint crystal, write for the vertex of root weight , and use two distinct zero-weight vertices . There are eight root vertices and two zero vertices because the zero-weight space is the two-dimensional Cartan subalgebra. The complete lists of colored strings are
Every arrow in a given row has that row's color; the reverse arrows are the raising operators, and all unlisted lowering operations vanish. In particular the two zero vertices must not be merged.
For a constructive justification, let with the invariant symmetric form from part(a). The map
is an equivariant isomorphism , identifying the highest weight as . Compute its crystal as the highest-weight component starting at in , with labels for the defining chain. The crystal tensor-product rule is
where counts available raising steps and counts lowering steps in the color- string. It generates the following ten vertices:
Applying the displayed rule to these labels gives precisely the listed strings, proving the entire diagram rather than only its weight multiplicities. Tensor labels here are crystal vertices in the combinatorial limit, not an assertion that a bare ordinary tensor such as lies in .
Figure 1.
The two B2 fundamental crystals and the ten-vertex adjoint crystal, with distinct zero-weight vertices
. Details.