Nondegeneracy of the Killing form on a Cartan subalgebra

For a complex semisimple Lie algebra, the Cartan subalgebra is orthogonal under the Killing form to every nonzero root space. A vector in the Cartan subalgebra orthogonal to that whole subalgebra is therefore orthogonal to the entire Lie algebra and must vanish. On the Cartan subalgebra the form is $\kappa (h,h^{\prime })={\sum }_{\alpha \in \Phi }\alpha (h)\alpha (h^{\prime })$.

The real span of the simple coroots inside a complex Cartan subalgebra carries a positive-definite restriction of the Killing form. Equivalently it consists of the $h$ for which all roots have real values. The formula $\kappa (h,h)={\sum }_{\alpha \in \Phi }\alpha (h{)}^2$ is positive for $h\ne 0$, since the roots span the dual. The induced dual inner product makes the root system Euclidean and makes root reflections orthogonal.